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New book on Top Secret America
Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have a new book, Top Secret America based on their series of stories that appeared in the Washington Post in July 2010. The book describes "the new American security state." Steven Aftergood has a brief overview of the book:
- A Spotlight on "Top Secret America", Secrecy News (September 1, 2011). Since 9/11 ... some 33 large office complexes for top secret intelligence work have been completed in the Washington DC area, the equivalent in size of nearly three Pentagons. More than 250,000 contractors are working on top secret programs. A bewildering number of agencies -- more than a thousand -- have been created to execute security policy, including at least 24 new organizations last year alone.... But the vast scale of this activity says nothing about its quality or utility. The authors, who are scrupulous in their presentation of the facts, are critical in their evaluation: "One of the greatest secrets of Top Secret America is its disturbing dysfunction."
Open Data, New Orleans
The city of New Orleans announces a new site for open data from the city:
- Data.NOLA.gov | Enabling New Orleans Aug 20, 2011 | This site is a catalog of public data sets produced by the City of New Orleans. We're starting small, with data sets that are found within the Department of Information Technology & Innovation, and will be adding data sets from other departments over time.
Budget Cuts Have Negative Effect on Performance.gov
New Performance.gov website faces performance problems of its own, By Joseph Marks, NextGov (08/26/2011).
A last-minute deal between the Obama administration and House Republicans to avert a government shutdown in April cut fiscal 2011 funding for online open government initiatives by more than three quarters to just $8 million. [An] OMB official said Thursday the administration does not consider the current version of Performance.gov to be compliant with the 2010 Government Performance and Results Modernization Act... ...The current version of Performance.gov does have a search bar, but it is only minimally functional. Searches for the names of federal agencies, such as "defense," "agriculture" and "transportation" for instance did not turn up any results. When the funding deal with lawmakers was reached, then-federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told Congress he would cut two planned open government initiatives and suspend planned improvements to others, including Performance.gov.Continue reading
Extending Collection Development to Web Archives
This isn't new information, but I don't think we've mentioned it here before. UNT, one of the participants in the End-of-Term Web Archive project (EOT), which aimed to capture the entirety of the federal government's public Web presence before and after the 2009 change in presidential administrations, is hosting a project to investigate innovative solutions to issues around web archives. The issues include being able to to identify and select materials in accord with collection development policies and being able to characterize archived materials using common metrics in order to communicate the scope and value of these materials to administrators. The project will use 10 librarian Subject Matter Experts who will classify the EOT collection according to the Superintendent of Documents (SuDocs) Classification System. The project will also develop a set of metrics to enable characterization of materials in Web archives in units of measurement familiar to libraries and their administrations.
- Classification of the End-of-Term Archive: Extending Collection Development to Web Archives, University of North Texas Libraries (21 April 2011).
- End-of-Term Web Archive
Tracking Hurricane Irene
National Journal's "Tech Daily Dose" has a list of links useful for for staying up to date on Hurricane Irene. These include resources from FEMA, The National Hurricane Center, and the National Weather Service, as well as state, local, and commercial resources.
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