FDSys Blog Discussion on “Policy Neutral”
There's a discussion going on at the FDSys blog that is very relevant to Jim's posting on the Copyright Office and IE. Continue reading
More government podcasts added to our directory
The number of government podcasters continues to increase and us volunteers at Free Government Information are doing our best to keep up by adding podcasts from NOAA and from Michigan's governor. All the podcasts we've found so far can be found our Government Podcasts page.
If you know of a federal, state, or local government podcast not covered on our page, please either note it in the comments section or drop me a line at dnlcornwall "at" alaska.net. Podcasts can either be of government agencies or elected officials. To be a podcast, you should be able to subscribe to the audio or video content through an RSS feed.
Thanks! Continue reading
Directories of Government RSS Feeds
A growing number of local, state and federal governments are using RSS Feeds to provide information to citizens. FGI is grateful that some official and unofficial guides to RSS feeds have sprung up, so we point you to those instead of reinventing the wheel. If you know of more comprehensive directories of government RSS feeds than the ones below, please drop a line to admin AT freegovinfo.info!
- Federal RSS feeds from FirstGov
- Federal and state feeds from RSSGov.com
- State and Local RSS Feed directories
- Michigan RSS Feeds - Feeds listed by Department
- Montana State agency publications feeds - listed by department.
Digital decay destroys modern American military history
The Fading Memory of the State is a Technology Review article talking about the immediate and massive problems that the National Archives and Records Administration is having in preserving electronic records.
This article contains several practical examples of what happens when electronic data is lost. One instance led to the failure to tell the story of the 1989 Panama Invasion, where 23 US soldiers lost their lives:
NARA's crash data-preservation project is coming none too soon; today's history is born digital and dies young. Many observers have noted this, but perhaps none more eloquently than a U.S. Air Force historian named Eduard Mark. In a 2003 posting to a Michigan State University discussion group frequented by fellow historians, he wrote: "It will be impossible to write the history of recent diplomatic and military history as we have written about World War II and the early Cold War. Too many records are gone. Think of Villon's haunting refrain, 'Ou sont les neiges d'antan?' and weep....History as we have known it is dying, and with it the public accountability of government and rational public administration." Take the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, in which U.S. forces removed Manuel Noriega and 23 troops lost their lives, along with at least 200 Panamanian fighters and 300 civilians. Mark wrote (and recently stood by his comments) that he could not secure many basic records of the invasion, because a number were electronic and had not been kept. "The federal system for maintaining records has in many agencies--indeed in every agency with which I am familiar--collapsed utterly," Mark wrote. Continue reading
Practical example of hard to use electronic file
Thanks to Grace York of the University of Michigan Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for letting us reprint this insightful GOVDOC-L posting in full for our (hopefully) growing nondepository audience:
People usually give me a blank look when I talk about making format (electronic, fiche, paper) appropriate to an individual document so here's an example.
Confirmation Hearings on Federal Appointments, Part 3 (Senate Judiciary Committee, Y 4.J 89/2:S.hrg. 108-135, pt.3) http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/pdf/108hrg/92548.pdf
This is part of the John G. Roberts confirmation hearing for the D.C. Circuit Court in 2003. It is 1236 pages long and about 41 MB. The Roberts testimony is scattered throughout, not just on a select group of pages. LEXIS Congressional only gives partial coverage of the text.
So, if I were a normal person, I would be nervous about downloading a document that size and I would much prefer to browse the paper to find where his testimony begins and ends, especially after doing a search for ROBERTS within the text using Acrobat. That's what I mean by usability. Continue reading
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