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Problems with White House Petition Website
An article in the Huffington Post examnes the White House We the People petition web site, and garners some interesting lessons about e-government. It finds that "getting 150 print signatures is vastly easier than getting 150 electronic ones," that the site was plagued with unannounced and unexplained downtime, and that the site had a cumbersome, difficult, time-consuming, and buggy registration process. It says that the registration process "violates the White House's own policy for registering on Federal government websites" and that the site's online record keeping features violate the White House's own Open Government Directive. It says that, initially, the We the People website was not even easy to find. It notes the special difficulties associated with assuring that individuals don't vote more than once, and the conflict of public officials wanting to maximize the public perception that they are open while at the same time doing as much as possible to control the flow of information that might prove politically damaging. It concludes that, regardless of the problems with the site, it "is praiseworthy as a significant new tool for bringing democracy into the Internet Age."
- The Case of the Missing White House Petitions by J.H. Snider, Huffington Post (Oct 31, 2011).
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to close two physical libraries
In an apparently leaked memo, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, says that as of Jan 1, 2012 they will no longer maintain a physical library facility at the two GFSC locations.
- Goddard Libraries Transition to Electronic Services, From: GSFC-Communications, To: GSFC-DL-ALL, Sent: Monday, October 31, 2011 11:20 AM, signed by Marilyn C. Tolliver, Chief Information and Logistics Management Division, and Robin M. Dixon, Head Knowledge Resources and Library Branch The Goddard Library; reprinted at SpaceRef.com (Oct. 31, 2011). Beginning January 1, 2012, the NASA Goddard libraries at Greenbelt and Wallops will transition to an all-electronic activity. In response to changes in the research environment and to Center-driven resource priorities, we will no longer maintain a physical presence but will focus on supporting the research needs of the Goddard community electronically. Our digital presence will remain as a portal to our vast collection of electronic material and our research specialists will continue to be available to support evolving requirements of Goddard's researchers.
- SpaceRef: "NASA Internal Memo: Goddard to Transition to Electronic Services", by Gary D. Price, INFOdocket (November 1, 2011).
- Will the library be building and preserving a collection or just linking to and licensing access to information resources held by others?
- Will the "new services" the memo mentions be in addition to or instead of older services?
- Is this just a "realignment of resources" within the libraries or is it a reduction in funding to libraries?
Economic Census at Risk
Congress is proposing cuts to the Census Bureau budget that would result in cancelling the next economic census.
- Census Confronts Budget Ax, By Ben Casselman, Wall Street Journal, (October 31, 2011). Economists warned that cutting the measure would rob policy makers of crucial information. "If you're trying to figure out what policy measures America should be taking right now to promote job growth for families and workers, without data sets like the 2012 economic census it's going to be a lot harder to do," said Matthew Slaughter, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and a former member of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. ...Conducted in various forms since the early 19th century, the economic census surveys roughly five million American businesses about their revenue, expenses, number and type of workers, and other information. The census data provide the framework for a swath of other economic measures, from inflation to industrial production to the gross domestic product, that are based on monthly or quarterly surveys. Because those surveys are far smaller than the Economic Census, they become less accurate over time unless recalibrated based on new census data.
- Census Chiefs: Cuts Will Leave Nation Flying Blind In Bad Economy, by Michael McAuliff, Huffington Post, (Oct. 27, 2011). Six of the last seven directors of the U.S. Census Bureau fear proposed cuts to the bureau's budget will blind the nation's financial experts. They're urging congressional leaders to reconsider reductions that could end the gathering of crucial economic data for the first time in 200 years.
Existing Regional Depository Library Models
There have been questions lately about shared regional depositories. Below is a table from the GPO Time for Change? document. Yellow indicates shared regionals within one state, and orange indicates one regional serving multiple states or areas. The same table is available as a PDF in the link below.
- Regional Depository Libraries in the 21st Century: A Time for Change?, A REPORT TO THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON PRINTING, U.S. Government Printing Office (June 2008). "Existing Regional Depository Library Models," Table 1, pages 5-6
Purpose of 1969 Nuclear Alert Remains a Mystery in new FRUS volume
Steven Aftergood says that State Department historians are still, in a new volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), unable to provide a definitive account of an event in October 1969 when the Nixon Administration secretly placed U.S. nuclear forces on alert.
- Purpose of 1969 Nuclear Alert Remains a Mystery, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, (October 25th, 2011).
- Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XXXIV, National Security Policy, 1969–1972. [PDF, 3.4MB] This volume documents U.S. national security policy in the context of the Vietnam War and the changing Cold War strategic balance between the United States and the Soviet Union.
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