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Index to reports published in the the Journals of the California Legislature 1905-1970
Here's a heads-up and a hat tip: Juri Statford from UC Davis has just published an Index to Reports Published in the Appendices to the Journals of the California Legislature 1905-1970. Congratulations Juri. This is a significant piece of work and will help librarians and the public get better access to historic California reports.
The California Legislature published reports in the Appendices to the Journals from 1849 to 1970. The Appendices include reports produced by California executive agencies as well as the California Legislature. In a few instances, the reports include work by the United States federal government or the University of California. This index provides references to over eighteen hundred reports published in the Appendices between 1905-1970. The reports cover a number of subjects including agriculture, state budget, banking, insurance, labor, education, social welfare, taxation, and water and natural resources. Bibliographic access to earlier reports from 1849 to 1904 is provided by the Index of Economic Material in Documents of the States of the United States, California 1849-1905 by Adelaide R. Hasse. (editor's note: the early CA and other state indexes are available in Hathitust) Stratford, Juri. (2012). Index to Reports Published in the Appendices to the Journals of the California Legislature 1905-1970 University Library, University of California, Davis.[posted with permission from Juri] Continue reading
It takes a village: NASA Curiosity successfully lands on Mars. See the documents behind the landing #MSL
On August 6, 2012 around 1:30am EDT, the NASA rover Curiosity successfully landed on Mars after a perilous "seven minutes of terror." And the Internet was abuzz! But remember there was a lot of hard work, analysis, community input and criticism that went into those 7 minutes of terror. You can find out more about the entire mars landing project by going to the GPO's Catalog of govt publications (CGP). And you can find NASA's Final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission on the Mars Science Laboratory site -- as well as some of the criticism about the project (yikes: "Mars Science Laboratory Mission says a launch accident discharging plutonium has a 1-in-420 chance of happening and could “release material into the regional area defined…to be within…62 miles of the launch pad,” That’s an area including Orlando."). And many of these and other NASA publications and technical reports are available in FDLP libraries around the country.
GPO FY13 budget approved by Senate Appropriations Committee
Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee reported out the Legislative Branch 2013 budget. According to the August 2, 2012 press release, GPO’s budget request was fully funded and will include:
- $83.7 million for Congressional Printing and Binding
- $34.7 million for Salaries and Expenses of the Superintendent of Documents
- $7.8 million for the revolving fund
- $126.2 million total
Government Printing Office - $126.2 million – This funding level is identical to the fiscal year 2012 enacted level in total funding. At the recommended levels, Congressional Printing and Binding will be funded at $83.632 million. This is a 7.8% reduction from the fiscal year 2012 enacted level and is identical to the request level. Within this reduced funding level, full funding is provided for printing the 2012 edition of the U.S. Code, which is published every six years under authority of Title 2, U.S. Code. The amount recommended for Salaries and Expenses is $34.7 million, which is a reduction of $272,000 from the enacted level. This funding level would allow the GPO to continue mission requirements ordered by the Congress. The bill would provide $7.8 million for GPO’s Revolving Fund for critical maintenance of printing systems. Of this amount:Also in the bill, the Library of Congress' budget allocation is slated for $592.2 million. The bill would provide an additional $4.9 million for the LOC, which is an increase of 0.8% above the fiscal year 2012 enacted level. This funding level assumes current staffing levels. There's still some haggling to be done with House Legislative Branch FY13 appropriations bill -- most notably the revolving fund is only budgeted at $4,096,000 rather than the Senate's proposed $7.8 million. Stay tuned! Continue reading
- $3.4 million is for Information Technology Projects such as development of a replacement system for the XML system, and replacement of systems critical to GPO’s network security monitoring and protection;
- $3.8 million is for Federal Digital System Projects; and
- $460,000 is for fire and safety projects at GPO facilities.
FOIA request about the cost of American Factfinder with pointers to MuckRock and census.ire.org
I ran into this odd post recently about the US Census Bureau's census tool called American Factfinder -- odd because it was mix of interesting, fact-based reporting with a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek facetiousness. Nursing a "long-standing grudge against another piece of contractor-built government software," William Hartnett (who may or may not be a journalist) decided to submit a FOIA request to find out how much it cost to build and then wrote a post about it entitled "The U.S. Census Bureau’s American FactFinder, which everyone in the universe hates, cost taxpayers $33.3 million. So that’s great." Hartnett's FOIA request garnered an amazingly quick response from the US Census Bureau:
The name of the company that developed the current version of the American FactFinder web application is IBM U.S. Federal and the total $33,340,681.00.While I'm the first to admit that FactFinder is a difficult and confusing tool to use (not to mention that the Census Bureau decided not to host the 1990 census data on AFF2 but instead to only make it available for download on their FTP server!), I would put it in neither the "useless boondoggle" nor even the "steamy pile of sh*t" category. But at least now we now know how much FactFinder cost to build. Besides that little informational tidbit, Hartnett also provided pointers to 2 Web sites of interest: Muckrock: This site, for a small fee (not clear if they'll manage your FOIA fees exemption), helps researchers, journalists and the public submit and manage their FOIA requests, and scans and makes them available to the public. Check out the FOIA requests currently in their queue. You can follow @MuckRockNews on twitter. Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) has a Census project "designed to provide journalists with a simpler way to access 2010 Census data so they can spend less time importing and managing the data and more time exploring and reporting the data." This is a great example of a useful tool built from bulk data supplied by the US Census Bureau! Check out the tool and let us know what you think. Continue reading
FRASER adds new Marriner S. Eccles Document collection on economic history and the Fed
The St Louis Fed's FRASER (Federal Reserve Archive) has just announced the addition of the new Marriner S. Eccles Document collection. It looks to be especially relevant to economic historians and those interested in economics and the [w:Great Depression].
FRASER, a digital library dedicated to preserving the nation’s economic history, recently added the Marriner S. Eccles Document Collection. The new collection provides access to nearly 10,000 documents from the archival collection housed by the University of Utah. Eccles served as Chairman (1934-48) and member (1948-51) of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The collection provides research material about the Federal Reserve System, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s, as well as Eccles’s role in the monetary and fiscal systems of the United States during those years. The documents can be browsed and searched by box, date, author, or keyword (the keyword field searches title, author, and description). Full-text searching is also available through a site-level advanced search, which can be narrowed to only items in the Eccles collection. Other archival collections that have been made digitally available on FRASER include Papers from the Committee on the History of the Federal Reserve System (held by the Brookings Institution) and the William McChesney Martin Jr. Document Collection (held by the Missouri Historical Society). FRASER has more than 640 publication titles, dated from 1789 to the present, that can be browsed by title, author, date, or topic. Full-text searching is also available.Continue reading
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