Author Archives: James A Jacobs

The next president should open up the Bush Administration's record, By Steven Aftergood, Nieman Watchdog February 07, 2008

The next President will have the authority to declassify and disclose any and all records that reflect the activities of executive branch agencies. Although internal White House records that document the activities of the outgoing President and his personal advisers will be exempt from disclosure for a dozen years or so, every Bush Administration decision that was actually translated into policy will have left a documentary trail in one or more of the agencies, and all such records could be disclosed at the discretion of the next President.

Lunchtime Listen/Watch: danah boyd!

danah boyd has done some of the best and most creative research on social networking, particularly how teenagers are using technology. She is a PhD candidate at the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of California Berkeley. She describes her research this way:

My research focuses on how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts. In particular, my dissertation examines how American teenagers socialize in networked publics like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube. I am interested in how the architectural differences between unmediated and mediated publics affect sociality, identity and culture.

She is a dynamic speaker, prolific blogger, and insightful, passionate researcher. If you have never heard danah speak, I recommend watching this brief video! It should be of interest to anyone who wants to understand how young people are using technology and that should be all librarians because that is affecting how they use (and expect to be able to use) the library and its services. (It starts off looking like it is going to be a beer ad, but stick with it; that's just showing where the interview was held.)

Video Interview with danah boyd, Discover Magazine (Feb 12, 2008). 14 minutes. (here is an alternate link to the same video)

Army Blocks Public Access to Digital Library

Army Blocks Public Access to Digital Library by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, Feb. 13, 2008.

Public access to the Reimer Digital Library, which is the largest online collection of U.S. Army doctrinal publications, has been blocked by the Army, which last week moved the collection behind a password-protected firewall.

But today the Federation of American Scientists filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking the Army to provide a copy of the entire unclassified Library so that it could be posted on the FAS web site.

The Army move on February 6 marks the latest step in an ongoing withdrawal of government records from the public domain....

The move came as a surprise since only unclassified and non-sensitive records had ever been made available at the Library site.

February 14, 2008 / 1 Comment on Public Library Features Army Captain’s Blog

Public Library Features Army Captain’s Blog

Cheryl Napsha, the director of the William P. Faust Public Library in Westland Michigan, persuaded an Army Captain who is stationed in Baghdad to write a blog about his experiences and features it on the library's Web site, westland.lib.mi.us. Captain Adrian Massey, who is from Michigan, posts to the blog about twice a week. Massey is the author of a book of poems titled "A Soldier's Poetic Response: A Slice of his Life." The blog itself is at poetadrianmassey.blogspot.com/.

Library shows another side of war in Iraq, By Cecil Angel, Detroit Free Press, February 13, 2008.

Political RSS feeds

Will Johnson notes in a post to the OpenHouse Project mailing list that RSS feeds from Members of Congress are almost impossible to find and, "I'm pretty sure that some of the offices aren't aware that their CMS [Content Management System] is generating a feed." To help out he has set up an interesting remix/mashup called PolFeeds, which grabs those feeds as well as those from candidates. He describes it this way:

PolFeeds. n. A website that brings you virtually all of the RSS feeds offered by Presidential Candidates, Members of Congress, and the White House together in one place.

In his post he describes a bit about how flexible this is:

If you want info from a particular politician, you can just go to "name.polfeeds.com". For example, barackobama.polfeeds.com will give you the content for all of Obama's feeds, Twitters, YouTube videos, blog posts, Flickr photos, everything. Of course, you can limit your view to particular types of items. If you want to see only blog posts by House members, you can go to polfeeds.com/house/blog.

Appending "/rss" onto the end of any url will give you the rss feed for the items on that page. You can also subscribe to the feeds individually or create a custom feed. For example, you could put together videos from Pelosi with blog posts from McCain and press releases from Boehner.

Very cool!