Time once again for a selection of news and new resources that we hope will be an interest to the FGI community. The posts are from INFOdocket.com (@infofodocket) where we compile and post new items daily from a variety of resources.

1. “Obama Wants Better Digital Archive of Federal Records” + Full Text of Presidential Memorandum

2. Now Available: EPA Releases Formerly Confidential Chemical Information

3. San Antonio, TX: New Online Database: Historical Election Results are Digitized

4. Statistics Canada to Make All Online Data Free

5. UK Parliament: MPs to Investigate Library Closures

6. TR Center Officially Launches the Theodore Roosevelt Digital Collection

7. Idaho: Libraries to Adjust to New Internet Filtering Law

8. U.S.: National Archives Trust Fund To Sell Copies of the 1940 Census (Digital & Microfilm Versions) Available

9. All Thing Preservation: New NARA (National Archives) Twitter Stream & Tumblr Page

10. U.S. History: Senator George Mitchell Oral History Project Debuts Online

11.New Social Media Resource: “PolitickerUSA is the Best Way to Track Politicians’ Tweets”

12. Video Now Online of NARA’s “What’s Next in Social Media” Forum

13. Child Welfare Information Gateway — State Guides & Manuals Search

14. GPO Releases Its First App

15. New UN Database Available: Expert Panel Launches Tool to Fight Arbitrary Deprivation of Freedom

16. State of Minnesota Posts Franchise Disclosure Documents (FDD)

17. U.S. Government: USAID Launches New GeoCenter

18. Public Access to Indiana’s Historic Sanborn Maps Provides Treasure Trove of Information

19. California: More than 13,000 Online Maps Provide Historic View of State

20. UNESCO’s Global Open Access Portal Now Online

Have you ever checked out the reading lists of the armed forces? Interesting!

• Reading Lists Aim to Promote Personal, Professional Growth, By Donna Miles, American Forces Press Service (Nov. 22, 2011).

  [P]rofessional reading remains an important part of the military culture. Every service, most professional military schools and an increasing number of geographic and combatant commands offer up reading programs and reading lists as part of their professional development efforts.

  In fact, many have multiple reading lists, aimed at different groups within the military at different ranks and stages of their careers.

  "...What I discovered reading Hemingway, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Updike, Forester, McCarthy and countless other authors shaped my world view and honed my understanding of the most complex terrain in the world: the human heart." [Navy Adm. James G. Stavridis, commander of U.S. European Command and NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe]

Hat tip to beSpacific!

Here is an interesting article that examines the use of criminal digital forensic tools to discover and repair corrupted digital information in digital archives, but there is another story here as well. Although the title doesn't tell you this, Fox actually looks at two alternatives for digital preservation: digital forensics and what he calls "the buddy system."

• Fox, Robert, Forensics of Digital Librarianship, OCLC Systems & Services, 27 (2011), 264-271 . [subscription required]

Fox describes the buddy system this way: "[W]hen more than one system is responsible for maintaining the integrity of any given digital object. If each system in question has a copy of the object, and they are verifying the integrity of that object against the objects that their "peers" possess, there is a much higher probability when they agree that the integrity of the object is intact. This is a "digital buddy system" of sorts, because each peer helps the other peers in it's network maintain the integrity of commonly held digital objects. This is the principle behind the LOCKSS electronic resource preservation system (LOCKSS, n.d.; Rosenthal and Reich, 2000), which is a peer-to-peer preservation system now in wide use, and developed and maintained by Standford University."

He notes further:

Studies over the last decade have indicated that digital preservation is most successful when the information "is best preserved by replicating it at multiple archives run by autonomous organizations".... These concepts have been in place for almost ten years, but it has only been in the last four-to-five years that libraries have attempted to preserve anything beyond e-journal content using P2P network systems. [emphasis added]

Politics is so tiring. The same old talking points every day. Wouldn't it be nice if someone in Congress would give us a non-partisan objective view of our options? Oh, wait! The Congressional Budget Office does just that! Recent testimony by the CBO director tells us (yet again) what CBO has been telling us: that extending unemployment benefits produces more output and better increase in employment per dollar spent than any other option. Looking for a document (or an agency) to feature on your blog or GovInfo home page? Here you go!

• Policies for Increasing Economic Growth and Employment in 2012 and 2013, Statement of Douglas W. Elmendorf, Director Congressional Budget Office, before the Committee on the Budget United States Senate, Congressional Budget Office (November 15, 2011) [54 pages, PDF].

  Comparing the estimated effects of different policy actions shows the following:

  • Policies that would have the largest effects on output and employment per dollar of budgetary cost in 2012 and 2013 are ones that would reduce the marginal cost to businesses of adding employees or that would be targeted toward people who would be most likely to spend the additional income. Such policies include reducing employers’ payroll taxes (especially if limited to firms that increase their payroll), increasing aid to the unemployed, and providing additional refundable tax credits in 2012 for lower- and middle-income households.
  • Policies that would primarily affect businesses’ cash flow but would have little impact on their marginal incentives to hire or invest would have only small effects. Such policies include reducing business income taxes and reducing tax rates on repatriated foreign earnings.

Our friends at OMBWatch just published an interesting post highlighting several studies that compare and contrast the policy and practice of transparency of the US and other countries based on comparative analysis of FOIA, foreign aid, and budgets and revenues. The post, entitled "Global Studies Highlight U.S. Transparency Strengths, Weaknesses" "...provide[s] useful measures of U.S. openness relative to real-world conditions, in addition to highlighting global best practices and alternative approaches." It also references a group created in September 2011 called the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and highlights the US' role in the group and their joint Open Government Declaration signed by the US and 7 other countries -- with 38 more countries signing in March 2012. Read the rest of the post to find out where the US ranks among the countries of the world in terms of transparency and open government.

Here's the list of studies cited by OMBwatch:

• audit of FOIA laws in 105 countries and the European Union by the Associated Press (AP)
• Global Right to Information Rating released by Access Info Europe and the Centre for Law and Democracy
• Quality of Official Development Assistance report, published Nov. 14 by the Brookings Institution and the Center for Global Development
• "The Money Trail: Ranking Donor Transparency in Foreign Aid" by Anirban Ghosh and Homi Kharas, published in the November issue of the journal World Development (available to subscribers only :-( )
• Aid Transparency Index 2011 by the organization Publish What You Fund

The CIA World Factbook is adding new categories of societal data.

• The World Factbook Is Changing, Central Intelligence Agency (Nov 18, 2011).

  [T]he Factbook is adding new categories of societal data, which--along with other demographic and economic entries--offer additional insight into a country's economic strength, internal stability, and impact on the environment. After a comprehensive search for datasets that are current and regularly updated, nine new fields have been added, with the World Health Organization and the World Bank providing most of the information. Eight of these fields appear in the renamed "People and Society" category: Health expenditures (as percent of GDP), Physicians density (per 1,000 people), Hospital bed density (per 1,000 people), Maternal mortality rate (deaths per 100,000 live births), Drinking water source, Sanitation facility access, Children under the age of five underweight (percent), and Obesity - adult prevalence rate. The ninth new field appears in the Economy category: Unemployment, youth ages 15-24.

Hat tip to INFOdocket!

Congress Nixes Climate Service, By Curtis Brainard, Columbia Journalism Review (Nov 21, 2011).

NOAA's budget request for fiscal year 2012 (which began October 1) included a proposal to reorganize its existing climate capabilities and services into "a single point of entry" for users called the Climate Service. The stated goal was to "more efficiently and effectively respond to the rapidly increasing demand for easily accessible and timely scientific data and information about climate that helps people make informed decisions in their lives, businesses, and communities."

Despite the fact that the proposal did not call for any additional funding to establish the new office, Republican lawmakers opposed it every step of the way, according to the Post's Brian Vastag, who was seemingly the only reporter to spot Congress's decision to scuttle the Climate Service during budget negotiations last week.

A new article in LLRX:

Learning to Live Without a Statistical Abstract: Thinking about Future Access to Government Information, By James T. Shaw, LLRX (November 20, 2011).

Please do not get your hopes up, or at least not very much. There is no truly good alternative to the Statistical Abstract in terms of providing both convenience and breadth.

Our Sunlight friend John Wonderlich provides some in-depth context for the Department of Justice's proposed new FOIA rules and from the blog title it's easy to guess what those new rules look like -- "Justice Department's New FOIA Regulations: Still Worse than Reported". Wonderlich's colleague Daniel Schuman created a side-by-side comparison of current and proposed new regulations, to help illuminate the differences.

Instead of obfuscating regulations and making them more restrictive, DoJ lawyers should be trying to simplify and expand the scope of FOIA in line with the Obama Administration's stated goals and Open Government Initiative. Otherwise, the rhetoric of "an unprecedented level of openness in government" and the establishment of "a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration" will ring hollow or worse.

The DOJ sent a letter to respond to Congressional concerns about their lying about the existence of records. The letter hardly paints a clear picture, but basically says that the DOJ will withdraw a section of the proposed regulations, but that their conduct won't change, and that they'll continue to mislead requesters about whether records exist or not.

Unmentioned in the letter, however, are all the steps backward on FOIA that the DOJ is proposing in their rules. In a package completely at odds with President Obama and Attorney General Holder's public FOIA rhetoric, the new DOJ rules throw up new roadblocks and hurdles to requesters, and generally make it easier to deny requests. One has to wonder what possible motivation DOJ has for forcing elementary schools to pay for FOIA requests, where they used to qualify for fee waivers. Have elementary school students' FOI requests become a burden?

It has been two weeks since our last report, mostly because I've been wrapped up in National Novel Writing Month (NANOwrimo).

Our volunteers remain active and productive at the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project.

SUBJECT PAGE ACTIVITY

Health Practitioner Databases (Lynn McClelland)

With the addition of OK, OR, TX, WV and WY. Lynn now has 38 states plus the District of Columbia represented on this page. I was particularly surprised by the number of practioner databases were available for West Virginia.

OTHER WIKI ACTIVITY

See our last 14 days of activity at http://tinyurl.com/statedbs14d for a blow by blow description of changes to the wiki. Here are a few highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

INDIANA ( Kimberly Brown-Harden)

Closed Institutions and Student Records - This website contains a database of defunct, or closed schools in Indiana and were accredited by the Commission. Students can also request academic transcripts.

MISSOURI (Annie Moots)

Missouri State Highway Patrol Online Boat/Drowning Incident Reports - From the web site: "Information on this site is preliminary information relating to boat incidents and drownings investigated by the Missouri State Highway Patrol, Water Patrol Division. (Incidents investigated by agencies outside the Missouri State Highway Patrol, Water Patrol Division are not included.) They are posted here automatically and remain online for 29 days." These are not official reports.

NEW MEXICO (Adrienne Walker)

Find Your Legislator - Locate current members of the House of Representatives and the Senate by name, district or zip code. Former legislators can be searched by name. There are also documents available listing current leadership, addresses, phone numbers and seating charts for the New Mexico House of Representatives and the Senate.

OTHER STATE NEWS

Liz Paulus has done EXTENSIVE link checking and fixing to the Oregon page.

ORPHAN NEWS

Our last official orphan remains Rhode Island. Will you be the one to take the last "unadopted orphan?"

If you're interested in adopting Rhode Island, check out our volunteer guide and then send me an e-mail if you'd like to adopt it. If you adopt Rhode Island, be prepared to put your name and contact information on the main project page AND your state page within two weeks of receiving your wiki login. See the Volunteer guide for more details.