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NARA Nears Completion of Ingesting Bush Records
NARA Nears Completion of Ingesting Bush Records, National Coalition for History (Sept 4, 2009).
The National Archives and Records Administration announced this week that the agency has nearly completed the process of loading the electronic records of President George W. Bush into the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system. To date, more than 85% of the total volume has been ingested. ...The intake of these records is expected to be complete by the end of September, 2009. Currently, the use of the system is limited to Presidential Libraries staff...See also: Archives reports progress on road to digital ERA, by Max Cacas, Federal News Radio, (Sept. 3, 2009). Continue reading
White House Will Post Visitor Logs Online
On September 3, the Obama administration and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) settled four ongoing cases regarding public access to White House visitor records. As a result, for the first time in history records of White House visitors will be released. President Obama issued a statement saying that each month, records of visitors from the previous 90-120 days will be made available online.
- White House Will Post Visitor Logs Online, National Journal, "Tech Daily Dose" (September 4, 2009).
- Obama Administration To Release White House Visitor Records, National Coalition for History (September 4th, 2009).
- White House Takes Huge Step Toward Transparency, By Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation (09/04/09).
What is wrong with this picture?
The Executive Office of the President is looking for a private company to archive some of its presidential records. The records in question are those published by EOP on publicly-accessible web sites including social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Does this strike anyone else as indicative of a major problem with how the government is approaching records retention and preservation? Will they just call it "outsourcing" and hope that magic word makes all the questions go away? Wouldn't it be easier, more comprehensive, and more authoritative for the government to capture its own records on the way to social networking sites? Its workflow of a) posting to commercial services, b) paying contractors to extract content from those servers and c) reformat it for preservation sounds like very bad planning to me. Surely we need governments to start taking their own communications seriously and create preservable records rather than try to re-create records in order to preserve them. The idea of creating hard-to-preserve records using commercial services and having to go through extra steps to re-capture and re-format the information is doing two things wrong instead of one thing right.
- Web Archive, Solicitation Number: WHO-S-09-0003, Agency: Executive Office of the President, FedBizOps (Aug 21, 2009).
- Administration wants help archiving its Facebook, Twitter content, By Ben Bain, Federal Computer Week (Sep 02, 2009)
- Administration issues solicitation to archive social media content, By Gautham Nagesh, NextGov (09/03/2009).
POTUS tracker
The Washington Post has an RSS feed called, The POTUS Tracker. It lists events location and events for the President of the United States. There is also a more traditional Calendar view of the President's activities and you can view events by issue, type, and attendees. Continue reading
NYT enhances its Congress API
The New York Times has a nifty interface that programmers can use to access information about Congress, the Congress API. Recently, they have added improvements including bill cosponsorships, a new members response, and member voting record comparisons. Read about it here:
- Congress Returns, As Does an Improved Congress API, By Derek Willis, New York Times Open Blog, (September 2, 2009).
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