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CIA closes office that declassifies historical materials
CIA closes office that declassifies historical materials, By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times (August 21, 2013). "The Historical Collections Division is the latest casualty of sequester cuts. The office handling Freedom of Information Act requests will take over the work. "...Some of the declassification is required by law, so the Historical Collections Division, which focused on discretionary declassification involving topics that scholars found compelling, was the easiest target for trimming costs...." Hat tip to InfoDocket! Continue reading
NYC geographic data now available for free
The city of New York has finally made a wealth of geographic data available for free. As The Atlantic reports, where you once had to pay $1,500, now the entire package of data -- cleverly trademarked "BYTES of the BIG APPLE" by the city -- can be accessed for free. This also means that anything made from the data can be shared on the Internet.
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Status of ERIC
ERIC (AKA, "Education Resources Information Center") of the Department of Education has an announcement of limitations of its new web site during the transition from the old web site.
- Note from the Commissioner, Ruth Curran Neild, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance Institute of Education Sciences. As ERIC transitions into a new contract cycle ... there will be a delay in indexing material. New material will not be released from August through October. ... Currently, the full text of all peer-reviewed articles and of all articles published after 2005 is released, as are the articles released through the scanning process. We are continuing to scan user-requested PDFs during this transition, but the mechanism to release the cleared PDFs will not go live until this fall. ...In early 2015, ERIC will release a brand new section of the ERIC website that allows users to browse ERIC's content by topic area. Continue reading
Georgia Claims Its Annotated Laws Are Covered By Copyright, Threatens Carl Malamud For Publishing The Law
Georgia Claims Its Annotated Laws Are Covered By Copyright, Threatens Carl Malamud For Publishing The Law, by Mike Masnick, techdirt (Jul 30, 2013). Masnick notes that, technically, states that claim to be able to copyright their laws are on reasonably firm legal ground, even if they're on completely illogical common sense ground but that fact "doesn't make it any saner to claim such a copyright." Among other things, Georgia claims (apparently as a justification) that the unannotated Georgia Code is available to the public at no charge at www.legis.ga.gov. Masnick continues:
It's not as if the state needed the "incentive" of copyright to publish an annotated version of the law. If anything, this seems like copyright misuse. But, even beyond that, it just seems counterproductive from a public policy standpoint to want to make your own laws harder to understand.Continue reading
Why we need digital deposit
August 13, 2013 / 1 Comment on Why we need digital deposit
David Rosenthal describes a change in the text of a speech that Attorney General Holder gave last October touting the governments Distressed Homeowner Initiative. The text of the speech as originally posted has been changed, apparently without notification or explanation. Continue reading →
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