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Online Child Protection and Free Speech Legislation
The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) has released a report from a joint project they conducted with the Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF). The project tracks more than 30 pieces of federal legislation that seek to protect children online, some of which pose serious threats to free speech. The reports summarize and categorize child online safety bills introduced in the 110th Congress, analyze free speech implications of key bills, and provide recommendations to Congress on how it can promote child online safety without impinging on First Amendment rights. Here's the Bill Tracking Report [38 page PDF] which is nicely organized - it has the legislation indexed by popular name, topic, Senate Bill and House Bill numbers, and federal agency/department. For each bill you can see the text in html or pdf and then concise information about the bill as well as the analysis by both the CDT & PFF. You can also download the CDT Analysis [PDF] and the PFF Analysis [PDF] of the legislation. In their summary the CDT states that " Many of the child protection proposals now pending in Congress... would not be effective child protection measures and would raise very serious policy and constitutional problems."
Continue readingSearchability at the Smithsonian website
The January 7 issue of Federal Computer Week had an article by Ari Schwartz (deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology) that summarized the findings of the "Hiding in Plain Sight" report that was blogged about here on FGI in December. In the article Mr. Schwartz mentions that they found that the Smithsonian Institution (among other agencies) website resources had information obscured "including many online content collections in the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System". The Smithsonian has responded in a letter to the editor of Federal of Computer Week: "All of the databases in the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) are site-mapped according to the international standard ... SIRIS has 1,679,277 records available via the sitemaps to crawlers such as Googlebot. According to Google, 1,567,170 records from SIRIS, or 93 percent, are included in the Google index. We started working on the sitemaps in February 2007 and worked directly with Google engineers in June to enhance the accessibility and ranking of our records. We understand that the public expects to find all Smithsonian information in one system, but as stated on our home page, SIRIS contains only information from the Smithsonian’s libraries, archives and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s research databases. The museum collections information is available through other systems described on the Smithsonian’s home page. However, efforts are under way to make one-stop searching available to the public in the future. We continue to work hard to raise the visibility of our data to the public through multiple channels, including search engines." Thanks for the clarification, Smithsonian and we're glad to hear you are responsive to the public. Continue reading
The Other Federal Elections
The February 2008 issue of Searcher magazine has an article by Laura Gordon-Murnane entitled "The 51st State: Congressional Elections" (pdf) in which she talks about the other (non-Presidential) federal elections. In November the nation will also elect 435 Representatives and 33 Senators, and we don't hear much about all those elections. So to help educate us before we vote she has thoughtfully provided an online tutorial called Tech Tools for the American Voter and the 2008 Congressional Elections. It steps you through how to get educated for the upcoming Congressional elections. You can use it to find out if you are registered to vote, find biographical information on your Congressman or Senator as well as his or her voting records, and follow the money donations and campaign fundraising for the upcoming election. The tutorial shows different websites and how you can learn more about the voting process and the candidates. It's informative and it provides a painless way to get informed before casting your vote. Hat tip to Sabrina Pacifici's blog, beSpacific.
Continue readingMichigan marks a milestone in book digitization
The librarians at the University of Michigan/Google book digitization project - called the "MBook Project" - had cause to celebrate on Friday as they digitized the millionth book in their collection, leaving just 6.5 million more to go. Michigan is one of the only institutions partnering with Google to agree to scan every one of its holdings — even those that are still covered by copyright. The MBooks project provides full text of works that are in the public domain, creating new ways for users to search and access U-M Library content (anyone can access this digital content). Materials that are currently in copyright are available for searching on-line, allowing users to assess the contents of a book before deciding whether to purchase it or borrow it from the library. Are there any govdocs in the collection? A quick search in their catalog did turn up some govdocs, beautifully digitized. I went to the Mirlyn library catalog (very nice OPAC, btw) and did an Advanced Search using keyword Subcommittee AND Titleword =Congress AND titleword= Hearing* and searched just the format= Electronic Resource (according to their FAQ, that's the way to find the MBook content). I got 3064 hits ranging in date from 1896 to 2007 - for example, this 1935 digitized hearing before "a subcommittee of the Committee on military affairs, United States Senate, 74th Congress, on S. 1404, a bill to promote the efficiency of national defense." We don't even have the microfiche in my law library. So the good news is that there are digitized Congressional hearings freely available to the public in the MBook project. For some reason, though, I have found that a number of them, like this 1924 hearing, come up as "Search Only: Page images and full text of this item are not available due to copyright restrictions." I thought there weren't any copyright restrictions on government documents.
Continue readingThe Transportation Security Administration has a blog
Yes it's true. The Transportation Security Administration, those people who xray your suitcase and make you take your shoes off at the airport, has started a blog called Evolution of Security with the blog description "Terrorists Evolve. Threats Evolve. Security Must Stay Ahead. You Play A Part.
And it's (gasp) clever! Take for example the opening sentence of a Feb. 1 post: "Throughout the ages, there have been many unanswered questions that continue to baffle the human race. Who built Stonehenge? Is there life on other planets? Why does the TSA make me place my liquids in a clear sealable baggie?" There are even a couple of videos about why they do what they do, and they promise more. Transparency and humor from the government. Thank you. I'm so pleased that I won't even ask about the mascara they stole appropriated from my toiletry bag last year. Continue reading
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