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Guide of the Week: Improving US Image
Note: Below is the entry that should have appeared last Saturday. My apologies for the delay.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently identified Improving the US Image Abroad as one of 13 urgent issues facing the next President and Congress. Today on Guide of the Week, we’ll talk about some librarian produced guides from the ALA GODORT Exchange Wiki that can help inform citizens, Congress and President-Elect Obama on this issue.
There appear to be two librarian-produced guides that look helpful in this area:
- Government Publications on Islam (University of Colorado at Boulder Government Publications Library, 2008)
- Public Opinion Sources (Univ. of California–Berkeley, 1999) Last updated 5/9/2006
The Islam guide provides a few links to efforts in American “public diplomacy” as well as hearings and studies about current thinking and opinion in Islamic countries. UC Berkeley’s guide on public opinion sources provides information on current and past public opinion trends at home and abroad. It has a mix of print and electronic resources.
Next time I’ll be dealing with librarian produced guides relating to “finalizing plans for the 2010 Census.”
Guide of the Week: Defense Spending
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently identified defense spending as one of 13 urgent issues facing the next President and Congress. Today on Guide of the Week, we’ll talk about some librarian produced guides from the ALA GODORT Exchange Wiki that can help inform citizens, Congress and President-Elect Obama on this issue.
While there do not appear to be any guides that specifically address defense spending alone, the guides below and taken together should be helpful:
- Military Information Resources and Periodicals (University of Colorado at Boulder Government Publications Library, 2008)
- Resources for Weapons Systems Policy Research (John Hernandez, New York University, 1999) Last updated 6/2004
- Budget (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 2001) Last updated 3/10/2008
- U.S. Government Documents: The Budget Process (Jerry Breeze, Columbia University, 1999) Last Updated sometime in 2008
I’m juggling several projects this week so I’m hoping you’ll be willing to check out the above guides without teasers from each. I will say that John Hernandez’s guide has a full section devoted to the budget and procurement process relating to weapons purchases. This section also helps you find out information on specific defense contractors.
Next week I’ll be dealing with librarian produced guides relating to “improving the U.S. image abroad.” So if you have any guides relating to that topic, please try and post them to the Handout Exchange this week.
Moving Toward A 21st Century Right-To-Know Agenda
In case you missed this report when it was released last month (as an MS Word document), you might want to check it out now (in PDF):
- Moving Toward A 21st Century Right-To-Know Agenda Recommendations To President-Elect Obama And Congress, By the Right to Know Community, as distributed by the Obama-Biden Transition Project.
Many library organizations and individual librarians signed on to this document, which mentions FDLP specifically and recommends that “The president should direct agencies to insure that their government information products are included in the FDLP and thus public access assured.”
It also notes that “Currently, private companies enter into non-competed agreements with agencies – often Memoranda of Understanding that are not public – and create subscription/charge-based access to public records that they have digitized at ‘no cost’ to the government.” It recommends that “The next administration should create incentives to convert government documents to no-fee, electronic, publicly available documents.”
Obama Transition Team To Reveal Documents and Meetings with Groups
Your Seat at the Table, by Dan McSwain, Change.gov, December 5, 2008.
In a memo released today, Obama-Biden Transition Project Co-chair John D. Podesta announced that all policy documents from official meetings with outside organizations will be publicly available for review and discussion on Change.gov.
There are some really interesting documents on the Your Seat at the Table page of Change.gov.
See Also:
Principles for an Open Transition
Lawrence Lessig launched the website An Open Transition which offers President-elect Obama three principles to “guide the transition in its objective to build upon the very best of the Internet to produce the very best for government”.
These principles include:
– No Legal Barrier to Sharing
– No Technological Barrier to Sharing
– Free Competition
Read more about these principles, view the video, and sign the petition at open-government.us.
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