Home » Articles posted by James A Jacobs (Page 110)
Author Archives: James A Jacobs
The 1967 Census of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: A Digitized Version
Here is an interesting set of census data, digitized from print. The dataset documentation (The 1967 Census Of The West Bank And Gaza Strip: A Digitized Version Dataset Documentation, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Joel Perlmann, Project Director, November 2011) also presents a detailed description of the methods used to create accurate, usable, digital statistical tables from print.
- The 1967 Census of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: A Digitized Version, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. In the summer of 1967, just after the Six-Day War brought the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli control, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS) supervised a census in these territories. The census included an impressive array of questions about individuals, households, and the quality of residences—about age, sex, religion, place of residence, educational attainment, occupation, industrial sector, income, household structure, health, female fertility, and housing conditions. Moreover, it asked two crucial questions about refugee status: Had the individual lived prior to the 1948 War in the area that became the State of Israel? And, Was the individual living in or outside of a refugee camp at the time the census was taken? The ICBS prepared seven volumes of reports based on this enumeration—the first modern census reports on the Palestinian population. Yet these volumes have not been used extensively in the writing on the evolution of the occupied territories. One reason is that they are not widely available, and even when at hand they are subject to all the limitations of older volumes published as quickly as possible in order to be of use at the time. For this reason, the Levy Economics Institute is offering, for the first time and free of charge, the content of six of these volumes (the seventh to be added shortly) in machine-readable form, in the hope that the data can be exploited by researchers interested in a fuller understanding of the social history of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories. Bard student volunteers contributed appreciably to this project.
House To Be More Open
The House of Representatives has adopted new "Standards for the Electronic Posting of House and Committee Documents & Data." The rules affect bills, resolutions, amendments, and conference reports of the House and for committees: rules, bills, resolutions, committee prints, meeting notices, witness lists and testimony, public notices, amendments, and committee record of votes. In addition, video of committee hearings and markups will be stored by the House to meet requirements for archiving, access, searchability, and authenticity.
- House To Be More Open: OKs Online Publication Standard, by Daniel Schuman, Sunlight Foundation, (Dec. 16, 2011). Taking effect on January 1, 2012, the resolution instructs the Clerk of the House to maintain a single website where the public can access all House bills, amendments, and resolutions for floor consideration in XML. In addition, committees will be encouraged to post their documents on that site in XML whenever possible -- and searchable PDFs when not -- with the expectation that mandatory publication requirements in XML will soon be imposed.
- Standards for the Electronic Posting of House and Committee Documents & Data, "Committee Resolution," Committee On House Administration.
Federal Register wins award
Walter Gellhorn Innovation Award Winner: Office of the Federal Register, Administrative Conference of the United States (December 9, 2011).
The Office of the Federal Register, in cooperation with the Government Printing Office, provides bulk access to the source code of the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations. The value in this effort includes making data available in bulk so others may use it, working collaboratively with the community and encouraging innovation, and making source code for a government website available so other agencies and non-governmental organizations can make customized versions.Success Story: federalregister.gov: The daily newspaper for the government. GPO press release [PDF]. Continue reading
The Purpose and Legitimacy of Presidential Libraries
The excellent magazine Miller-McCune has a fascinating article on control of Presidential Libraries:
- Nixon's Presidential Library: The Last Battle of Watergate, By Andrew Gumbel, Miller-McCune (December 8, 2011). Should the National Archives be in the business of presenting objective public history at the nation’s presidential libraries? Or should the private organizations that fund many of these institutions be able to lionize their man in the White House? In an exclusive from the upcoming issue of Miller-McCune magazine, learn how the fractious new partnership between the Archives and the foundation intent on rehabilitating Richard Nixon's legacy has become the issue's bellwether.
Achieving a collaborative FDLP future (#FDLP)
December 23, 2011 / 1 Comment on Achieving a collaborative FDLP future (#FDLP)
Note: This post is a longer response to a recent comments left on the LJ article written by Jim A. Jacobs and Melody Kelly.
Recently, Library Journal published a short article that Melody Kelly and I wrote (The Future of the FDLP: From Conversation to Confrontation). In such a short opinion piece, we did not have the space to document our arguments and expand on our reasoning. Since the article was posted, it has received a few comments. So we are using this post to expand on our LJ piece a bit and re-post here our replies to those comments.
As we said in LJ, the discussions about shared regional depositories have morphed from a conversation into a confrontation. This was our main point. As Daniel Cornwall said here recently, just as GPO needs to work with FDLP, so all FDLP libraries should be working with GPO, not working against it. We are concerned that the tactics adopted by ARL and many of the association's prominent members are more confrontational than cooperative and that such tactics may harm GPO at a time when it needs our support.
Some of the issues involved are complex and confusing and we imagine that many non-FDLP librarians -- and even some in the FDLP community -- find it difficult to follow the sometimes arcane, legal details of the arguments on both sides. This is particularly true when attempts are made outside the current GPO rules to redefine the scope or procedures of an existing Regional.
Continue reading →Continue Reading →