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CIA search: Down for two years and counting
Yesterday, when I was writing a post about The CIA’s Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf, I was looking on CIA.gov for a link to all the occurences of this regular feature in the CIA’s magazine Studies in Intelligence. Naturally, I used the CIA’s own search box. I was a bit surprised to find that every search I […]
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
Four Seriously Cool Information Resources
Our friend Gary Price has started a new series over at searchengineland on "incredibly useful online information resources that are most effectively searched using their own site search tools, rather than relying on general-purpose engines to surface their valuable content." This looks to be a series worth following. At least 3 of the 4 in his first entry should be of particular interest to government information specialists: the C-SPAN Video Library, Old Maps Online, and Archive-It. Gary's comments are always useful. Did you know that, "unlike the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Archive-It collections are keyword searchable"?
- Four Seriously Cool Information Resources, by Gary Price, Search Engine Land, (March 9, 2012).
Science.gov Goes Mobile Plus New Databases Added!
Via INFOdocket: First, Science.gov Mobile is now available at m.science.gov as a web app. No download required. Second, Science.gov added three new databases today that are available when searching either at Science.gov or m.Science.gov. The new databases:
- Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) (EPA) under Environment and Environmental Quality
- DOE Data Explorer under Math, Physics, Chemistry (a product of Science Accelerator)
- Energy Science and Technology Software Center (ESTSC) DOE (a product of Science Accelerator)
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