I'm not sure how long this has been going on, but in trying to retrieve a report from the Education Resources Information Clearinghouse (ERIC), I received this "error" message:

Dear ERIC Community,

We have currently disabled access to many ERIC full-text PDFs due to the discovery of personally identifiable information in some documents. A team is in place to check each PDF to see if it contains personally identifiable information. Due to the quality of many of the documents, a large portion of the search has to be done by hand. This will take several weeks, but our primary concern is to protect the privacy of individuals.

To minimize the burden on our users, we will prioritize searching the PDFs that users request. If you would like to request a PDF to be returned online, please fill out this form, which requires only the document’s ERIC record number and your email address. Full-text PDFs will be returned on a rolling basis. We will be posting the list of newly released documents here.

We are sorry for the inconvenience and want to thank you for bearing with us through this unexpected delay.

The ERIC Team

It seems like a responsible enough message and they are trying to assist researchers who need documents. It would have been nice if the message had a date stamp so we could see how long it will take ERIC to rectify this situation.

I'm also wondering about the status of ERIC fiche collections. Wonder if we'll see withdrawal requests from ERIC and whether that would wind up highlighting the personal information they're trying to withdraw.

This week at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases:

ORPHANS: AND THEN THERE WERE SIX

With the pending adoption of the District of Columbia, we now have six states up for adoption:

• Florida
• Hawaii
• Kansas
• Maryland
• Minnesota
• Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting.

DATABASE ACTIVITY

For a full listing of activity over the past week, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are some highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

ARKANSAS (April Sheppard)

Child Care Provider Search - Search for licensed child care providers and ABC and Headstart facilities by name, facility number, location, child age, hours and voucher acceptance.

UTAH (Susanne Caro)

American Indian Collection - Part of a database of Utah publications, this section includes information on the Ute (Uintah and Ouray), Dine' (Navajo), Paiute, Confederated Tribes of Goshute, Northwestern Band of Shoshone, Skull Valley Goshutes, Ute Mountain Ute (White Mesa).

NEW RESOURCES ON THE "NOT DATABASES" PAGE

As mentioned in some previous activity reports, our project volunteers occasionally find useful materials out of scope for our main project pages. Usually this is either a state produced resource that is not a searchable database or it is a searchable database not produced by a state agency.

These resources live on our Not Databases page. This week Janice Wilson, our Connecticut added Veterans.ct.gov, which contains information about CT and federal services and benefits available to veterans.

I had the distinct honor to be invited to speak at the University of Washington Libraries on thursday, January 24, 2013. I want to thank Cass Hartnett, the Northwest Government Information Network, the UW Information School, the UW Association of Library and Information Science Students (ALISS), and the University of Washington Libraries for allowing me the opportunity to talk publicly about the future of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). the audio for my talk can be downloaded from the UW Library digital archive or streamed below from the Internet Archive.

that is all.

We’re at the very beginning of the digital era where tools, policies, best practices, etc are all in flux. In many ways, we’re at the age of new metaphors needed to describe what it is that we as librarians do on a daily basis.

I'd like to talk about the underlying historical ideals of the FDLP, discuss how those ideals have been under fire from both within and without the library community and argue that those ideals applied to today's new information metaphors give us the best chance at access to and long-term preservation and assurance of govt information.

Then I’ll talk about some of the digital collection strategies that I’ve found to be successful and then conclude with a bit about collaboration and to-dos.

Twitter announced last Friday that all 100 members of the Senate as well as 90% (398 members) of the House of Representatives are on Twitter. In the 112th Congress only 44% of Senators were on Twitter. House use of Twitter has also increased from 35% to 90% (398 representatives). Twitter also announced that Michelle Obama will be tweeting from @FLOTUS about her life as First Lady.

• An entire Senate on Twitter. Really. By Joseph Marks, NextGov (January 23, 2013).

  Raw numbers can be misleading where Twitter is concerned. The federal tech sphere alone is littered with rarely used Twitter accounts. The Senate’s story seems different, though.

  A quick review of about 30 senators’ handles revealed no slackers. All of the senators -- or usually their staffs, of course -- are tweeting at least several times a week but, more importantly, a solid proportion of those tweets include content that would actually be valuable to people following the senators’ activities, such as links to legislation the lawmaker introduced, notes on committee work and alerts about media appearances.

• 100 Senators and the 57th Inauguration, Twitter Blog (January 18, 2013).
• US Senate: A public list by Twitter Government: "Principal Accounts of Members of the U.S. Senate (a mix of campaign and government accounts)."
• US House: A public list by Twitter Government: "Principal Accounts of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives (mix of campaign/govt accounts)".

The Center for Effective Government, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, was formed as OMB Watch in 1983 to lift the veil of secrecy shrouding the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). In January 2013, OMB Watch became the Center for Effective Government.

• Center for Effective Government (website).
• Government Matters (newsletter)
• The Fine Print (blog)
• RSS feeds
• twitter.com/foreffectivegov
• facebook.com/foreffectivegov

New volunteers and ongoing work marked this week at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases.

NEW PROJECT VOLUNTEERS

Our project welcomed four new volunteers this week:

April Sheppard - Arkansas
Stephanie Martin - Indiana
Mary Sauers - Nebraska (A hand off from departing volunteer Beth Goble.)
Ed Sperr - South Carolina

In other volunteer news, Susanne Caro adopted the Montana page. She also maintains the Utah page.

SEVEN REMAINING ORPHANS

With our additional volunteers, our list of orphan pages now stands at seven:

District of Columbia
Florida
Hawaii
Kansas
Maryland
Minnesota
Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting.

DATABASE ACTIVITY

For a full listing of activity over the past week, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are some highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

ARKANSAS (April Sheppard)

National Register of Historic Places (AR) - Searchable by county, city, name and description.

SOUTH CAROLINA (Ed Sperr)

Most Wanted - is a listing with photographs of the most wanted, absconded criminals.

TEXAS (Ann Ellis)

Texas Higher Education Data - This site contains information organized for policymakers, parents and students, media, institutions and researchers, and educators. It includes forms, maps, charts, graphs and reports. Texas legislative issues related to higher education are included.

WYOMING (Karen Kitchens)

License Types and Fees - Search for current Wyoming fishing and hunting license fees by type (species) and resident or nonresident. Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

The great technology publisher O'Reilly is making its Open Government book files available for free for anyone to download, read and share. The files are posted on the O’Reilly Media GitHub account as PDF, Mobi, and EPUB files for now.

• We're releasing the files for O'Reilly's Open Government book: A #PDFtribute to Aaron Swartz (announcement) by Laurel Ruma, O'Reilly Radar (January 18, 2013).
   
• Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice, Edited By Daniel Lathrop, Laurel Ruma, Foreward by Don Tapscott. O'Reilly Media (February 2010).

Be sure to check out Chapter 25, "When Is Transparency Useful?" by Aaron Swartz.

A story in the scholarly kitchen quotes a leaked draft of a new federal government data policy saying:

...every department and agency is directed to inventory all of its funded datasets and put them all into Data.gov to the extent practicable. This is basically a fundamental change from voluntary to mandatory inclusion and from "a few of your best" to "everything you have."

Read the complete article here:

• Leaked Data Policy Raises Monster STM Data Issues, by David Wojick, the scholarly kitchen (Jan 17, 2013)

  ...there is almost no STM research data in Data.gov, just a few bits and pieces...

  All this may now change because the draft data policy takes a new approach to feeding Data.gov. Now, every department and agency is directed to inventory all of its funded datasets and put them all into Data.gov to the extent practicable. This is basically a fundamental change from voluntary to mandatory inclusion and from "a few of your best" to "everything you have."

Enhancements to U.S. Statutes at Large on FDsys, FDLP.gov (16 January 2013).

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) recently enhanced the U.S. Statutes at Large collection on FDsys by adding descriptive metadata for public laws, private laws, concurrent resolutions, and presidential proclamations. For approximately 32,000 individual documents, the enhancements allow researchers improved searchability and retrieval by searching such metadata fields as title, SuDocs classification number, date, category, etc. The U.S. Statutes at Large collection includes volumes 65–115, covering the 82nd –107th Congresses, from 1951–2002.

The additional descriptive data was added by both manual and automatic processes. A team of GPO staff members from Library Services and Content Management (LSCM), including catalogers and automation librarians, added descriptive metadata for titles, public law numbers, and dates.

• Access the U.S. Statutes at Large collection on FDsys. [scroll down on linked page]

In 2011, GPO announced the release of digitized volumes of the U.S. Statutes at Large, in partnership with the Library of Congress. The U.S. Statutes at Large is the permanent collection of all laws and resolutions enacted during each session of Congress.

Even before we learned of Aaron Swartz's passing last friday, several colleagues and I were in the midst of writing letters nominating Aaron for the ALA James Madison Award which was established by the ALA in 1986 to "honor individuals or groups who have championed, protected and promoted public access to government information and the public’s “right to know” on the national level."

We write now to ask all of our readers to also submit letters in support. The deadline for letter submission is January 16, 2013, so get a move on!

Send e-mail nominations to Jessica McGilvray, Assistant Director for the ALA Office of Government Relations, at jmcgilvray@alawash.org. Submissions can also be mailed to:

James Madison Award / Eileen Cooke Award
American Library Association
Washington Office
1615 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20009-2520

To help you in your letter writing, below are the nominating and seconding letters we submitted. Feel free to copy/paste for your own letter of support.

Many thanks go to Bruce Sanders, librarian at DePauw University, and Kelsey Kauffman, the mother of Aaron's partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, for putting the idea of nominating Aaron for the Madison Award out in the universe and doing much of the work that went into the nomination.

To: Jessica McGilvray
Re: Nomination of Aaron Swartz for ALA James Madison Award

Dear Ms. McGilvray:

I am writing to nominate Aaron Swartz for the 2013 American Library Association James Madison Award. Aaron was the computer programmer who in 2008 downloaded nearly 20 million pages of text from the Public Access to Court Electronic Records System (PACER), and then donated the pages of public domain US Court documents to public.resource.org in order to make those documents truly open access. This act was the epitome of promoting open access of government documents.

Like many earlier Madison honorees, Aaron has been an outspoken advocate and practitioner of open access. In fact, it is fair to say that much of his life was devoted to open access. Through his online organization DemandProgress.org, now a million members strong, Aaron educated a large segment of the population about the dangers of PIPA and SOPA and led highly effective campaigns in opposition. As a result, he engaged millions of ordinary citizens in the political process and put Congress on notice that Internet censorship will be vigorously opposed by large swaths of the voting (and soon-to-be-voting) public. In 2007, at the age of 20, he founded Open Library, an ongoing project to provide information free-of-charge on every book ever published. In 2008 he penned “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.”

Aaron also conducted a study on “Who Writes Wikipedia” that exploded the myth that a small core of Wikipedians is responsible for most of the content (though they are responsible for most of the edits). The reality --- that Wikipedia is, in fact, the creation of millions of mostly one-time contributors --- has provided us with one of the best examples of the power and quality of open source collaboration.

Past recipients of the Madison Award, such as Senator Patrick Leahy, Steven Garfinkel, Thomas Susman and Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, have usually been established and highly effective advocates either within government or organizations close to seats of power. But in many ways the driving force today behind the open access movement is a younger generation raised with the understanding that knowledge can and should be shared not just nationally, but also globally, and without paywalls.

Aaron Swartz embodied this younger generation’s passionate commitment to open government, free and universal access to knowledge, and an informed civil society. He is truly deserving of receiving this award posthumously.

Respectfully submitted,

Bruce Sanders
Head of Cataloging and Processing
Roy O. West Library
DePauw University

Seconding letter:

To: Jessica McGilvray
Re: Nomination of Aaron Swartz for ALA James Madison Award

Dear Ms McGilvray,

The nominating letter by our colleague Bruce Sanders discusses reasons why Aaron Swartz should be nominated for the 2013 James Madison Award for his articulate and passionate leadership against SOPA and for devoting his life to promoting open access to scholarly and government information. As the New York Times described him in a 2011 front-page article, Aaron was “an Internet folk hero … a civil liberties activist who crusades for open access to data.” Aaron, in the spirit of the ALA Library Bill of Rights, believed that academic work and government information should not be commodified but instead distributed freely. He devoted his short but unimaginably prodigious life to his ideals. We wholeheartedly second Aaron’s posthumous nomination.

As noted in the nominating letter, Aaron was a pioneer in the new academic research methods of large-scale data collection and analysis. Aaron had extensive experience downloading and analyzing massive data sets, and in the process greatly enhanced our understanding of who controls access to knowledge—from correcting erroneous assumptions about who in fact authors most material on Wikipedia to raising alarms about undue corporate influence over legal scholarship. Aaron was studying the corrupting influence of money on a wide range of institutions including academia and government when his JSTOR troubles began.

His act of downloading articles from JSTOR for intellectual pursuit should have been encouraged and supported. Instead, it led the US government to indict and threaten him with 35 years in prison and a million dollar fine for wire- and computer fraud even after JSTOR refused to pursue criminal charges. Yet, until the end, Aaron never wavered from his ideals nor gave up his integrity.

The world and Libraries need more Aaron Swartz’s. We hope that the ALA will join us in honoring Aaron’s leadership in protecting the Internet from censorship and corporate interests and his life-long commitment to open access to scholarship and government information for every person on the planet. Aaron’s passing this week has motivated many people around the world to carry on his torch by uploading and freely sharing their writings on the Internet in his memory. We hope that ALA will honor Aaron by not only giving him the 2013 Madison Award, but also fostering his ideals and forwarding his work.

Respectfully submitted,

Shinjoung Yeo
PhD candidate and co-founder of Radical Reference and Free government Information

James Jacobs
Government Information Librarian and co-founder of Radical Reference and Free government Information

Brief Biography of Aaron Swartz:

Aaron Swartz’s, brief biography:
• Born 1986, Chicago, Illinois
• 1999 at the age of 13 creates a program for an open source encyclopedia, theinfo.org
• 2000 co-authored the RSS 1.0 standard for news aggregation
• 2001
o joined the founding team of Creative Commons and developed their metadata system
o joined the RDF Core Working Group, the standards body for the Web
o worked on the semantic web writing popular guides as well as specifications and co-wrote the article, “The Semantic Web: a Network of Content for the Digital City,” Proceedings Second Annual Digital Cities Workshop, Kyoto, Japan, October, 2001.
• 2002 wrote, “MusicBrainz: a Semantic Web Service,” IEEE Intelligent Systems, Jan./Feb., 2002 pp. 76-77.
• 2004 attended Stanford University for one year.
• 2005-2006 works for Reddit and develops the Python web framework, web.py, and releases it as an open-source project and also conducts study “Who Writes Wikipedia”
• 2007 developed Open Library, an open access project to collect metadata about every book ever published
• 2008 downloaded 20 million pages from PACER and made them truly public access
• 2010
o founds Demand Progress and begins activism that eventually defeats COICA, SOPA and PIPA bills
o fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics
o charged for crimes in relation to downloading 4 million JSTOR articles
• Dies January 2013