The Government Accountability Office recently identified Preparing for Public Health Emergencies as one of 13 urgent issues facing the next President and Congress. Today on Guide of the Week, we'll talk about some librarian produced guides from the ALA GODORT Exchange Wiki that can help inform citizens, Congress and President-Elect Obama on this issue.

There appear to be two librarian produced guides that touch on public health emergencies:

• Government Documents on Health (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 1999) Last updated 3/10/2008
• Chemical and Biological Disarmament (Grace York, University of Michigan, 2000) Last updated 1/9/2005

Bert's guide is to documents about health in general, but he points to resources like Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Reports, Public Health Reports, the Senate Homeland Security & Govt. Affairs Committee and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which all deal with public health emergencies. There is also the usual Chapman catalog instructions on how to seach for government health policy and reports.

Although Grace's guide is titled "Chemical and Biological Disarmament", the government's response to a mass epidemic would be similar whether or not the disease was man made. Some of the resources Grace includes that policymakers might find helpful are:

• PubMed
• Reading List for Princeton Biodefense R&D Workshops and Seminars
• Rand Corporation bioterrorism page
• World Health Organization

On an unrelated note, Grace's guide has a graphic illustration of boolean logic using Russians and Soviets that I think you'll find very helpful in sharing with the uninitiated.

There is more in both guides. I hope you'll read both and then share both if you find them useful.

I have to admit that I was somewhat surprised by what didn't show up on the ALA GODORT Exchange Wiki. There was nothing about bird flu (pandemic influenza) or specifically about bioterrorism. I know some librarians somewhere must have produced SOMETHING on these topics and I encourage you to post your guides to the Handout Exchange.

Next week I'll be dealing with librarian produced guides relating to "Food Safety" So if you have any guides relating to that topic, please try and post them to the Handout Exchange this week.

Note: Below is the entry that should have appeared last Saturday. My apologies for the delay.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently identified Improving the US Image Abroad as one of 13 urgent issues facing the next President and Congress. Today on Guide of the Week, we'll talk about some librarian produced guides from the ALA GODORT Exchange Wiki that can help inform citizens, Congress and President-Elect Obama on this issue.

There appear to be two librarian-produced guides that look helpful in this area:

• Government Publications on Islam (University of Colorado at Boulder Government Publications Library, 2008)
• Public Opinion Sources (Univ. of California--Berkeley, 1999) Last updated 5/9/2006

The Islam guide provides a few links to efforts in American "public diplomacy" as well as hearings and studies about current thinking and opinion in Islamic countries. UC Berkeley's guide on public opinion sources provides information on current and past public opinion trends at home and abroad. It has a mix of print and electronic resources.

Next time I'll be dealing with librarian produced guides relating to "finalizing plans for the 2010 Census."

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently identified defense spending as one of 13 urgent issues facing the next President and Congress. Today on Guide of the Week, we'll talk about some librarian produced guides from the ALA GODORT Exchange Wiki that can help inform citizens, Congress and President-Elect Obama on this issue.

While there do not appear to be any guides that specifically address defense spending alone, the guides below and taken together should be helpful:

• Military Information Resources and Periodicals (University of Colorado at Boulder Government Publications Library, 2008)
• Resources for Weapons Systems Policy Research (John Hernandez, New York University, 1999) Last updated 6/2004
• Budget (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 2001) Last updated 3/10/2008
• U.S. Government Documents: The Budget Process (Jerry Breeze, Columbia University, 1999) Last Updated sometime in 2008

I'm juggling several projects this week so I'm hoping you'll be willing to check out the above guides without teasers from each. I will say that John Hernandez's guide has a full section devoted to the budget and procurement process relating to weapons purchases. This section also helps you find out information on specific defense contractors.

Next week I'll be dealing with librarian produced guides relating to "improving the U.S. image abroad." So if you have any guides relating to that topic, please try and post them to the Handout Exchange this week.

In case you missed this report when it was released last month (as an MS Word document), you might want to check it out now (in PDF):

• Moving Toward A 21st Century Right-To-Know Agenda Recommendations To President-Elect Obama And Congress, By the Right to Know Community, as distributed by the Obama-Biden Transition Project.

Many library organizations and individual librarians signed on to this document, which mentions FDLP specifically and recommends that "The president should direct agencies to insure that their government information products are included in the FDLP and thus public access assured."

It also notes that "Currently, private companies enter into non-competed agreements with agencies – often Memoranda of Understanding that are not public – and create subscription/charge-based access to public records that they have digitized at 'no cost' to the government." It recommends that "The next administration should create incentives to convert government documents to no-fee, electronic, publicly available documents."

Your Seat at the Table, by Dan McSwain, Change.gov, December 5, 2008.

In a memo released today, Obama-Biden Transition Project Co-chair John D. Podesta announced that all policy documents from official meetings with outside organizations will be publicly available for review and discussion on Change.gov.

There are some really interesting documents on the Your Seat at the Table page of Change.gov.

See Also:

• Memorandum From John Podesta To All Obama Transition Project Staff (December 5, 2008) Re: “Seat at the Table” Transparency Policy.
• Video of Director of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs Michael Strautmanis

Lawrence Lessig launched the website An Open Transition which offers President-elect Obama three principles to "guide the transition in its objective to build upon the very best of the Internet to produce the very best for government".

These principles include:

- No Legal Barrier to Sharing
- No Technological Barrier to Sharing
- Free Competition

Read more about these principles, view the video, and sign the petition at open-government.us.

Continuing with our special "Guide of the Week" series relating to Presidential Transition issues:

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently identified protecting the homeland as one of 13 urgent issues facing the next President and Congress. Today on Guide of the Week, we'll talk about some librarian produced guides from the ALA GODORT Exchange Wiki that can help inform citizens, Congress and President-Elect Obama on this issue.

"Protecting the homeland" is a broader topic than it sounds. GAO itself broke down "protecting the homeland" into five subtopics - Prevention, Preparedness and Response; Critical Infrastructure Protection; Nuclear, Biological, Chemical and Radiological Threats, Homeland Security Acquisitions and Information Sharing. With these subtopics in mind, here are some guides that might better inform you on most of these issues:

• Depository Library Web Sites on Terrorism and Homeland Security (Karen Hogenboom, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, 2004) (GODORT Education Clearinghouse)
• Homeland Security (University of Colorado Boulder Government Publications Library 2008)
• National Security Policy (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 2001) Last updated 3/10/2008
• Climate and Weather (University of Colorado at Boulder Government Publications Library, 2008)
• Intelligence (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 2001) Last updated 3/10/2008

I think three of the guide titles are fairly self explanatory as why I've included them. I included Climate and Weather from UCB because it links to a number of resources to major weather disasters and how to prepare for them. Statistically speaking, very few people will be object of a terrorist attack, but 90% of the country will be affected by natural disasters, including hurricanes and the like. Bert Chapman's guide on Intelligence contains links to resources that specifically address information sharing between agencies and with Congress and the public.

Since I'm not covering each guide listed here in my usual "Guide of the Week" depth, you know that there is lots more in each of the guides. So go check them out. If you find them helpful, send the guide links to your Senators and Representatives. It's their transition too! And if you're a docs librarian with a guide to some of the urgent issues listed above, then please QUICKLY post your guide to the Handout Exchange.

In addition to the government resources covered in this entry, I'd strongly recommend the book The edge of disaster : rebuilding a resilient nation by Stephen Flynn. It's a book that contains policy solutions in addition to diagnosing problems with how we handle both natural and manmade disasters. For specific information on nuclear and radiological threats, the book Physics for Future Presidents by Dr. Richard Muller would be helpful. Or you could just watch his lecture on Nukes:

Next week I'll be dealing with librarian produced guides relating to "undisciplined defense spending." So if you have any guides relating to that topic, please try and post them to the Handout Exchange this week.

Change.gov continues to change. Now they seem to be hosting citizen led discussions on selected topics.

They started a discussion on health care this week. The starting point was a video briefing from the health care team followed a few starter questions. As of this writing, there were 44 pages of comments.

Comments default to be sorted by user rating. It appears to be working. The comments I saw at the top of page seemed to be thoughtful posts engaging the questions asked. Posts may also be sorted by date or "last activity." In addition, for hard core policy wonks, there is an RSS feed for new comments.

There is what seems to me personally a reasonable comments policy. The discussion itself is hosted by a commercial third party called Intense Debate.

Browsing around the first few pages, I didn't see comments back from the policy team, but that likely isn't feasible given the amount of comments. But I really appreciate them trying to have a constructive conversation among constituents. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Now if only they'd adjust their copyright policy to make it worthy of a dot gov.

The Caucus Blog at the New York Times online just published a blog entry about the recent return and changed Agenda pages at change.gov:

Changes at Change.gov: Return of the ‘Agenda’

The section of the Obama-Biden transition homepage detailing the president-elect’s policy proposals that was recently stripped from the site with little explanation, reappeared with some tweaks.

Call it the kinder, gentler Change.gov.

Gone are references needling the Bush administration for refusing to “tackle health care, education and housing in a manner that benefits the middle class” or for being “one of the most secretive, closed administrations in American history.”

Some pages in the “Agenda” portion of the site have been pared down, while others have been expanded. But the most obvious changes focus on weeding out the fiery campaign-style rhetoric of Mr. Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden that initially appeared on the transition Web site.

And I especially like this portion of the article:

There was an almost instantaneous outcry from bloggers and other advocates of transparency in government who noticed disappearance.

Perhaps they stumbled upon our blog?

And apparently, this website notatypewriter.com contains the original agenda pages in PDF and HTML format.

As of 12:30pm Alaska time, 11/16/2008, Change.gov appears to have restored agenda pages to http://www.change.gov/agenda/. No explanation and still copyrighted. But progress.

Thanks to everybody who wrote in. If you haven't and care about copyright/public domain issue, please look over Rebecca's post and send the letter or one of your own.

Daniel,

Good eye! that is The Public Papers of the President over the shoulder of President Elect Obama in his video address today.

The National Journal and Government Executive have created a new web site, Lost in Transition, for "Helping you navigate the Presidential Handover." Categories currently covered include: Appointments, Earlybird, Events, Insider Interview, Paper Trail, and The Short List.

You may have noticed some of our recent blog posts that discuss the copyright status of the President-elect's website, Change.gov, as well as the vanishing contents of the website, among other concerns. We here at FGI created a standard letter for you to use (see below) if you wish to contact Change.gov and let them know your concerns.

You can email the change.gov website by going to their Contact page at: http://www.change.gov/page/s/contact

If you do contact them, let us know in the comments of this post so that we have an idea on how many emails have been sent. Thanks!

Hello,

I strongly urge you to change the copyright statement on your site to clearly state that all information on the site is in the public domain. According to Copyright Law 17 U.S.C. § 105, "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government." Since the site is in the .gov domain, people expect the material on the site to have been produced by government employees and thus as being in the public domain.

If the bulk of material at change.gov was not created by federal employees, then I suggest that you post a blog entry explaining why your material is under copyright. You should also explore moving your content to a .org domain, which internet users understand can have copyrighted material. It would be ok to leave a redirect from change.gov to the new site as long as the new site was clearly labeled non-government.

There has been much discussion over this matter at the Free Government Information website, which you can read about here: http://freegovinfo.info/taxonomy/term/876.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Sincerely,
Rebecca Blakeley
Government Documents Librarian

UPDATE: Removed the portion of this template letter that asked for them to return the missing "Agenda" pages of the website. They've been restored!

In spite of the optimism about technology policy (See for example, Obama preparing comprehensive technology policy, By Hiawatha Bray The Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, November 12, 2008), the site continues to disappoint me.

Today I was searching on the site and got this message when I composed my second search:

    You are only allowed to search every 15 seconds.

Really? I continue to hope that they will fix problems and copyright claims. Maybe this isn't a harbinger of things to come but just one of many temporary transition problems.

Are you wondering who President-elect Barack Obama will appoint as the country's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO)? Want to voice your opinion on what their top priorities should be?

Then check out ObamaCTO.org and have your say! The website enables you to create an account, post your idea, comment on other ideas, and vote up to 10 times to help rank the ideas posted.

I've noticed some of the ideas posted may not relate to what a CTO might do or be in charge of, but maybe those will get ranked out! Or maybe they could be potential priorities in the future. Who knows? What are some responsibilities of this future CTO? Well, I wish I could tell you, but the "agenda" for Technology page, including information about a CTO, is "not available right now" according to the change.gov website. Oh, the irony!

But the Obama/Biden campaign website has some information still up on this issue of technology and a CTO where they state that:

Obama will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.

Tip o' the hat to BoingBoing.net for posting about this new website.