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First Audio on FDsys: President Kennedy Assassination Tape Recording
Press Release from GPO:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 30, 2012 No. 12-07 GPO SUPPORTS NATIONAL ARCHIVES ON PUBLIC ACCESS TO PRESIDENT KENNEDY ASSASSINATION TAPE RECORDING First Audio Content on FDsys WASHINGTON-The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is providing public access to the newly discovered audio tape recording of conversations between various individuals in Washington and Air Force One pilots and officials on board during the flight from Dallas to Andrews Air Force Base following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The tape recording is available on the U.S. Government Printing Office's (GPO) Federal Digital System (FDsys). This is the first time audio content is available on the system, which is a one-stop site for authentic, published Government information. GPO and NARA have a long-standing collaborative relationship in publishing the Federal Register and recently worked together to provide the public with electronic access to the Nixon grand jury testimony. Link to FDsys: www.fdsys.gov This digitized version of the two hour and twenty-two minute recording was donated to the National Archives by the Raab Collection. The tapes were found among other papers and memorabilia of Army Gen. Chester "Ted" Clifton, Jr., who served as senior military aide to President Kennedy. The White House Communications Agency (WHCA) provided the tapes to Gen. Clifton. The conversations were captured by WHCA, which routed all phone calls and radio traffic. The recording includes references to new code names and incidents, among them are a private conversation by head of the Secret Service Jerry Behn about the disposition of the President's body; an expanded conversation about how to remove the body from the plane and where to take it; an urgent effort by an aide to Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay to reach General Clifton; and attempts to locate various Congressmen from Texas. For more information go to: http://www.archives.gov/ "GPO is pleased to provide our digital services in partnering with NARA to make this important historical find available to the public," said Acting Public Printer Davita Vance-Cooks. "This collection marks the first time GPO is providing audio content on the site. We look forward to continuing our long-standing relationship with NARA and other Federal agencies in providing digital access to authentic Government information through FDsys."Continue reading
Interview with Carl Malamud
Readers of Slashdot asked Carl Malamud about his experiences and hopes in his project to prod the U.S. government into scanning archived documents. They asked questions about metadata, digitizing rare books, what he thinks about corporate partnerships in the process to get public data released, other projects like Ancestry.com and PACER, and even "Which government agency is the worst to get information from?" Malamud's answers are posted at the link below "with a mix of heartening and disheartening information about how the vast project is progressing."
- Carl Malamud Answers: Goading the Government To Make Public Data Public, Slashdot, Your Rights Online section, Posted by timothy on Monday January 23, 2012.
House Launches Transparency Portal
Daniel Schuman describes a House commitment to openness that resulted in action!
- House Launches Transparency Portal, by Daniel Schuman, Sunlight Foundation (Jan. 13, 2012). Making good on part of the House of Representative's commitment to increase congressional transparency, today the House Clerk's office launched http://docs.house.gov/, a one stop website where the public can access all House bills, amendments, resolutions for floor consideration, and conference reports in XML, as well as information on floor proceedings and more. Information will ultimately be published online in real time and archived for perpetuity. ...the ongoing process of releasing documents online, in real-time, and in machine-readable manner is a tremendous sea change from the slow and ponderous paper publications that are often late, fairly difficult to use, and unfriendly to computers.
HathiTrust to better identify federal documents
The HathiTrust announced that it will be adding a new field to its inventory files that will indicate volumes that have been identified as U.S. federal government documents.
- Update on December 2011 Activities, HathiTrust (January 13, 2012). Changes to Tab-delimited Files On February 1, HathiTrust will be adding three additional columns to the tab-delimited inventory files (“hathifiles”) available at http://www.hathitrust.org/hathifiles. The files are frequently used by partners and non-partners as a means to obtain full bibliographic records for HathiTrust items to load into local catalogs (see HathiTrust Data Availability and APIs). The additional columns will identify the publication date and publication location of volumes in HathiTrust, as well as volumes that have been identified as U.S. federal government documents.
Federal Open Market Committee Transcripts
The Federal Reserve has released transcripts of meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee from 2006, after a standard five-year delay.
As the New York Times notes, the transcripts...... clearly show some of the nation's pre-eminent economic minds did not fully understand the basic mechanics of the economy that they were charged with shepherding. The problem was not a lack of information; it was a lack of comprehension, born in part of their deep confidence in economic forecasting models that turned out to be broken.
- Inside the Fed in 2006: A Coming Crisis, and Banter, By Binyamin Appelbaum, New York Times (January 12, 2012). For a famously private institution known for its cryptic, formulaic statements, the meeting transcripts offer a rare glimpse of senior officials in relatively unguarded conversation, somewhat akin to the tapes that some presidents have made in the Oval Office. The Fed officials exchange jokes, gossip about people who are not present, and speak much more frankly about the economy and policy than they did in the public remarks that they made contemporaneously. The results are unlikely to burnish any of their reputations, inasmuch as they could not see the widening cracks beneath their feet.
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