Author Archives: James A Jacobs

The newest from the National Security Archive: "Ten years after Congress enacted the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments (E-FOIA), only one in five federal agencies actually complies with the law, according to a new survey released today during Sunshine Week by the National Security Archive." Agencies Violate Law On Online Information National Security Archive, 12 March 2007.

Only One in Five Federal Agencies Meets Congress's Requirements 10 Years After Electronic Freedom of Information Amendments "E-Delinquents" Include Air Force and Immigration/Customs; Education and NASA Rank as "E-Stars" with Excellent Web Sites Knight Open Government Survey by National Security Archive Covers 149 Federal Offices, Concludes "File Not Found"

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Stephen Ruth and Soogwan Doh, Is E-Government Ready for Prime Time?, IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 11, no. 2, 2007, pp. 80-82. (IEEE Distributed Systems Online)

This is an interesting take on e-government with an international and technical perspective. It includes a sidebar, "Touring E-Government Web Sites" that cites "Possibly the world’s best known e-government site, the US government’s official Web Portal" (USA.gov), as well as sites from the World Bank, The European Union, and North Korea. The article notes problems with e-government intitiatives quoting one study that says that only about "15 percent of e-government projects meet their goals and more than a third are complete failures." The authors do express optimism though. They say that "Some day, perhaps all citizens will be treated like customers" -- a statement that caries a lot of unstated political and information-access assumptions that should be examined closely.

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ALERT -- Tell Congress to restore access to presidential records, Lee White, Humanities & Social Sciences Online, H-NCH Discussion, 9 Mar 2007.

Urge the House of Representatives to pass H.R.1255, the "Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007." The bill would overturn Bush Executive Order 13233 and more.

Recent posts on FGI about hearings on access to presidential records here, here, and here.

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This is a well known story for documents librarians, but this is a good telling of the tale. It has the added benefit of being timely what with all that is going on about C-SPAN (see: C-SPAN provides more access, but wants to retain control). It includes links to Click.TV and Metavid (an open-source effort at UC-Santa Cruz that "has been building an impressive online archive of all the House and Senate floor proceedings from January 2006 forward") and more:

• The Imaginary Adventures of the U.S. Senate: Sorting fact from fiction in the Congressional Record by Jesse Walker, Reason March 8, 2007

What all this interest in video of Congress may lead to (and many of us would like to see it!) is an "open-source" version of the Congressional Record -- a transcript of what is actually said in Congress. It would make an excellent complement to the official CR. But this is hard to do now, because, as the Metavid folks discovered when they asked the government for transcripts, "the government wasn't willing to provide them with a pre-edited version of the daily Record." More Control of Information: your tax dollars at work! :-(

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