Selected volumes of the eminent State Department series, Foreign Relations of the United States, are now available as e-books for reading on devices such as the Kindle and Nook.

• E-Books Initiative, U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian.

  The Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State is pleased to announce the release of its Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series in a new e-book format that is readable on popular electronic devices such as the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad. The e-book edition combines many of the benefits of print and web publications in a new form that is portable and extremely convenient. During the pilot phase of the FRUS e-book initiative, five selected FRUS volumes are available here. The public is invited to download the new e-books and provide feedback to help improve the FRUS e-book edition. At the conclusion of the pilot phase later this year, the Office will work to offer e-book versions of many more FRUS volumes both through the Office website and on a wide array of e-bookstores. The Office will continue to expand and enhance its e-book offerings, as part of the ongoing FRUS digitization effort.

The volumes available are:

• Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967.
• Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume X, Vietnam, January 1973–July 1975.
• Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XXIV, Middle East Region and Arabian Peninsula, 1969–1972; Jordan, September 1970.
• Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XXXII, SALT I, 1969–1972.
• Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume E–12, Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973–1976.

Twitter, the 140 character social media micro-blog, was scheduled to go down for maintenance on monday night. But, according to the CNN blog, a little thing called the Iranian elections and a request from the US State Department caused them to change their scheduled downtime to yesterday afternoon from 2-3 PST (middle of the night Tehran time) in order to ensure that the flow of information from Iran remains open and that Iranians can continue to communicate internally and with the rest of the world. This is a pretty amazing development in that, despite the Iranian restrictions on journalists and news organizations, the world is still able to get up to the minute accounts - complete with video on youtube, hashtags on twitter and facebook. Now libraries just have to figure out how to collect, preserve and organize this massive flow of information ;-)

Mashable has more on why this matters as well as a HOWTO guide on following the elections.

Cross-posted from LegalResearchPlus.com
(written by our newest teammate, Sergio Stone. Sergio is Stanford's first Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian.)

U.S. international agreements on Dept. of State’s Case Act Databases

An often overlooked free source for recent U.S. treaties and other international agreements is the Department of State’s Reporting International Agreements to Congress under Case Act database.

Selected bilateral and multilateral agreements in full-text are available from 1982 through 2008. Unfortunately, the site does not include a keyword search function. The database consists of agreements submitted to Congress by the Dept. of State as required by the Case-Zablocki Act, P.L. 92-403, 86 Stat. 619, 1 U.S.C. 112b. (1972). The agreements appear on this site before they are published in the official compilations of Treaties and Other International Acts Series (T.I.A.S.) and United States Treaties and Other International Agreements (U.S.T.).

Agreements from 2006 through 2008 are available here.

Agreements from 1982 through 2006 are located at the Department of State’s FOIA site.