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New CRS Report: Retaining and Preserving Federal Records in a Digital Environment
[w:Steven Aftergood] over at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Project on Government Secrecy to (which you should all subscribe!) recently posted this CRS Report describing access to federal records over time as "increasingly complicated, costly, and potentially impossible.” We really appreciate Mr Aftergood's work over the years to shake loose and make publicly accessible government documents and especially CRS reports which are in the public domain but not distributed to the public or to FDLP libraries. Here's more on CRS reports. Thanks also to Sabrina Pacifici at the beSpacific blog for posting about it (and you should all subscribe to beSapcific too!). Retaining and Preserving Federal Records in a Digital Environment: Background and Issues for Congress. Wendy Ginsberg, Analyst in American National Government. July 26, 2013 Continue reading
NARA releases its annual Records Management Self-Assessment and a reminder to report fugitive documents
It takes a village ... of government information librarians to make sure that government documents within scope of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) are collected, described, and distributed to FDLP libraries around the country. Here's an example of how the FDLP safety net works for fugitive government documents -- those documents that *are* within scope, but have not made their way into the FDLP system.
- My friend Gary Price tweets about NARA's release of its 2012 annual "Records Management Self-Assessment" which tells the good, bad and ugly about whether or not Federal agencies are compliant with statutory and regulatory records management requirements.
- I retweeted it as I know lots of my followers are interested to know how federal agencies are doing in their archival responsibilities. Continue reading
CRS on Cloture and Filibusters
Cloture Attempts on Nominations: Data and Historical Development, by Richard S. Beth, Congressional Research Service, RL32878 (June 26, 2013). [Copy provided by the Federation of American Scientists.]
In recent years it has become increasingly common for Senators to seek cloture in order to limit chamber consideration of presidential nominations to positions in the executive and judicial branches of government. Cloture, which requires a super-majority vote, places time limits on consideration of a matter, and so may be employed as a means of overcoming filibusters. This report presents data on all nominations on which cloture motions have been offered... Continue reading
New NAP report: Frontiers in Massive Data Analysis
Hot off the presses from the National Academies is this prepublication version of a report Frontiers in Massive Data Analysis. This is a really nice survey of much of the state of the art and current issues involved in "big data." Govt information librarians owe it to themselves to become well-versed as more and more researchers across many disciplines will become interested in govt information as a corpus to do larger analysis (I'm already getting questions about corpus research!). Continue reading
Document of the day. Or why a paper document may be better than a digitized version
I just received an old (historic NOT legacy) Department of Commerce publication off of the needs and offers list called "Commercial handbook of China" by Julean Arnold, commercial attaché (WorldCat record). It's actually a 1975 reprint of a 1919 publication. It's chock full of statistics relating to provinces, cities, and consular districts -- agriculture, minerals and mining, populations, exports and imports, revenues, transportation, ports and shipping facilities etc. In short, this is a gold mine of historic information and statistics from the Republic of China (pre-Communist China). The document was digitized and is available in HathiTrust as well as the Internet Archive (see book reader below). However, in comparing the digitized version with the paper version in hand, I came upon several issues:
- there are 3 foldout maps that were not digitized. These maps are critical information on railway lines and treaty ports in China. The bibliographic record has a physical description including "2 v. fronts., plates, fold. map, tables, diagrs., fold. charts" but no content note mentioning that the maps were not digitized.
- As I mentioned, the document is chock full of statistical tables. Have you ever tried copying and pasting tabular data from a PDF? It's even worse when the tables are displayed in landscape rather than portrait. I've verified that the OCR fails on those pages.
- Lots of readability/usability issues: The table of contents is partially obscured in one copy and the tables are often blurred or faint. also, HT is using a process of OCR now where you can search but not copy or paste.
- Lastly, I find it ... uh... interesting that this book says here "Copyright: Public Domain, Google-digitized." But, if you want to download the whole book, you have to be an HT partner.
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