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Great news! New Bill calls for CRS reports to be publicly available
This is great news indeed! The Sunlight Foundation reported today that the "Public Access to Congressional Research Service Reports Resolution of 2012" (aka H. Res 727) has just been introduced by Representatives Quigley (D-IL) and Lance (R-NJ) -- many thanks to both of them. The resolution would ensure that reports by Congress's $100 million-a-year think tank will become available to the public on a website maintained by the House Clerk. Numerous good government groups and advocates for more congressional transparency -- including FGI! -- have endorsed the measure. Please contact your Representative and ask them to vote HELL YEAH! on H. Res 727.
The reports, prepared by the Congressional Research Service, are frequently cited by the courts and the media and requested by members of the public, but CRS does not release them to the public. Instead, they come to widespread attention after they are released in dribs and drabs by Congressional offices and painstakingly collected by researchers. Some are collected and sold for $20 a copy, while others are made available by non-profit organizations for public consumption. By the time they become publicly available, the reports can become outdated, especially when an issue is moving quickly in Congress. Reliable access to CRS Reports would ensure that everyone has timely and comprehensive access to the collective wisdom of hundreds of analysts and experts on political issues when they're at their most salient. This is already common practice in other support arms of the Congress, like the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office. In the past CRS reports have been more widely available, but relatively recent CRS-imposed policies are increasing limiting access even as the Internet has made the documents easier to share. In fact, the original limitation on public access was imposed in the 1950s on CRS's predecessor agency and arose from a concern about the costs of printing and mailing the reports -- not their confidentiality. In the Internet age, this limitation no longer makes sense, especially as these reports are already available on CRS's internal website in electronic form.Continue reading
Results from the NDSA Web Archiving Survey
In fall, 2011, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA)'s Content Working Group conducted a survey of US organizations either actively involved in, or planning to start, programs to archive content from the web. "The goal of the survey was to better understand the landscape of web archiving activities in the United States by identifying the organizations involved, the types of web content being preserved, the tools and policies being used, and the types of access being provided." The results of the survey are now available (PDF). The survey questions (PDF) are also available for reference. For a quick snapshot, see the preliminary results posted on the LOC blog.
Continue readingWeb Archiving Activity
The current web archiving activities of the survey respondents was as follows:
- 63% (49 of 77) have an active web archiving program.
- 16% (12 of 77) are actively testing a web archiving program.
- 17% (13 of 77) are planning on pursuing a web archiving program in the near future.
- 4% (3 of 77) formerly managed web archiving programs, but no longer do so.
Chart 1: Status of current web archiving activities.
Interestingly, of the 71 respondents that identified their web archiving goals, 80% (57 of 71) were archiving content “from other organizations or individuals for future research,” 69% (49 of 71) were preserving their own institutional web content, and 49% (35 of 71) were doing both.
In reviewing the full survey results, a number of themes emerged.
The recent emergence of web archiving, especially at academic institutions
One surprising result was the preponderance of universities that have initiated web archiving programs in the last 5 years. Of the 68 respondents that identified the specific year their web archiving began, nearly a third, 32% (22 of 68) began their programs within the last two years, the exact same number of institutions (22, 32%) that began archiving web content in the 17 years between 1989 and 2006. The recent surge in web archiving within the last 5 years – 68% (46 of 68) of those surveyed – is primarily due to universities starting web archiving programs.
Chart 2: Year began archiving web content.
Read the Congressional Record on the go!
Want to read the Congressional Record on the go? Well now you can with this Congressional Record iphone/ipad app created by the Library of Congress under the guidance of the Committee on House Administration. The app pulls data from ?the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Office of the Secretary of the Senate, and the Government Printing Office. With the app, the reader can:
- Browse editions of the Congressional Record by date: January 4, 1995 (the 104th Congress, 1st Session) to the present
- Perform keyword searches within individual documents or sections within documents
- Share documents via email
- Save documents to your preferred iPad PDF reader
- Identify the latest bills and resolutions considered daily on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives
- Identify the latest bills, resolutions, treaties, and nominations considered daily on the floor of the U.S. Senate
Welcome End-of-term-archive (@eotarchive) as FGI guest bloggers for July 2012
[UPDATE 7/2/12: I've added all the names of the people blogging as "EOT archive". jrj] It's been a while since we've had a guest blogger, but this month's turn at the podium will surely make up for it. Our guest bloggers for July, 2012 the members of the End of Term (EOT) Web Archiving project -- that's @eotarchive on twitter. Group members contributing blog posts include:
- Andrea Goethals: Digital Preservation and Repository Services Manager - Harvard Library
- Abbie Grotke: Web Archiving Team Lead - Library of Congress
- Cathy Hartman: Associate Dean - University of North Texas Libraries
- Michael Neubert: Supervisory Digital Projects Specialist – Library of Congress
- Kris Carpenter Negulescu: Director, Web Group - Internet Archive
- Tracy Seneca: Web Archiving Service Manager – California Digital Library
Smithsonian: the Vice Presidents that time forgot
For all you Presidential historians out there, the Smithsonian has a funny/sad/strange article about the history of the vice-presidency -- a job that John Adams, the first vice-president, described as "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived" and John Nance Garner, the 32nd VP from 1933-1941, said "wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit." Read on. It may make you want to visit Huntington, Indiana and the Quayle Vice Presidential Learning Center (yes THAT Quayle :-)). Read more:The Vice Presidents That History Forgot: The U.S. vice presidency has been filled by a rogues gallery of mediocrities, criminals and even corpses. Tony Horwitz. Smithsonian magazine, July-August 2012
The Constitution also failed to specify the powers and status of vice presidents who assumed the top office. In fact, the second job was such an afterthought that no provision was made for replacing VPs who died or departed before finishing their terms. As a result, the office has been vacant for almost 38 years in the nation’s history. Until recently, no one much cared. When William R.D. King died in 1853, just 25 days after his swearing-in (last words: “Take the pillow from under my head”), President Pierce gave a speech addressing other matters before concluding “with a brief allusion” to the vice president’s death. Other number-twos were alive but absentee, preferring their own homes or pursuits to an inconsequential role in Washington, where most VPs lived in boardinghouses (they had no official residence until the 1970s). Thomas Jefferson regarded his vice presidency as a “tranquil and unoffending station,” and spent much of it at Monticello. George Dallas (who called his wife “Mrs. Vice”) maintained a lucrative law practice, writing of his official post: “Where is he to go? What has he to do?—no where, nothing.” Daniel Tompkins, a drunken embezzler described as a “degraded sot,” paid so little heed to his duties that Congress docked his salary.[HT to BoingBoing!] Continue reading
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