FGI is looking for a few (or many) good bloggers
It's hard to believe we're rapidly approaching FGI's 9 year anniversary(!). We'd like to ring in our 10th year with an invitation to the community to become citizen documents bloggers. We don't want to have news and information critical to the govt information community fall through the cracks -- fugitive news?! -- and so we need your help. Are you a news hound? Maybe you'd like to cover the "doc in the news" beat like the one we just posted. Passionate about fugitive documents? Freshen up the blog with periodic posts about interesting fugitives -- perhaps ones you've found on the lostdocs blog. Policy wonk? You could set up Govtrack.us alerts and write about legislation of interest to libraries and the docs community.
The possibilities are limitless, but we need your help to make them a reality. Contact us at freegovinfo AT gmail DOT com if you're intrigued. Continue reading
Doc in the news: Pike report on the CIA
I ran across a story in the Guardian on Friday that sent me on a document hunt. Congressman Alan Grayson wrote a piece in which he referenced the Pike Committee investigation of the CIA: "Congressional oversight of the NSA is a joke. I should know, I'm in Congress." Alan Grayson. The Guardian, Friday 25 October 2013.
In the 1970s, Congressman Otis Pike of New York chaired a special congressional committee to investigate abuses by the American so-called "intelligence community" – the spies. After the investigation, Pike commented: 'It took this investigation to convince me that I had always been told lies, to make me realize that I was tired of being told lies. I'm tired of the spies telling lies, too.' Pike's investigation initiated one of the first congressional oversight debates for the vast and hidden collective of espionage agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA). Before the Pike Commission, Congress was kept in the dark about them – a tactic designed to thwart congressional deterrence of the sometimes illegal and often shocking activities carried out by the "intelligence community". Today, we are seeing a repeat of this professional voyeurism by our nation's spies, on an unprecedented and pervasive scale.Continue reading
State Agency Databases Activity Report 10/27/2013
My apologies for the long drought on updates for the State Agency Databases Project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. Volunteers have been active, but among other things I've been taking an amazing online class called the Hyperlinked Library through San Jose State University. The course materials are open and available at http://mooc.hyperlib.sjsu.edu/ and I think that all of the modules could be of considerable benefit to government information librarians. But I digress. For a listing of the last two weeks worth of activity, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs14d. Here are some highlights: DATABASES ADDED ALASKA (Daniel Cornwall) ScholarWorks@UA - Institutional repository for theses, dissertations and other research by University of Alaska Students and Faculty. May be searched or browsed by campus, issue date, author, subject, titles or type of resource. DELAWARE (John Stevenson) Door-to-door Salesperson Search - Searchable by salesperson last name, business name, or license number. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (Susan Paterson) Search current job openings - DC Department of Human Resources (DCHR) helps District agencies meet their staffing requirements by ensuring the highest level of customer service to city residents. MISSOURI (Annie Moots) Consumer Confidence Reports - Search for and view public water supply system reports by county. OHIO (Audrey Hall) Continue reading
Digging through the Government Attic
I love the [w:Freedom of Information Act (United States)] (FOIA)! It's a vital tool to researchers, journalists and the public -- so much so that there are now several sites that try to help manage the sometimes long and arduous FOIA process (see MuckRock and FOIA Machine). So I'm constantly on the lookout for sites that post FOIA'd documents that I can add to my FOIA web harvesting archive. One such site that has long had a place in my govt documents heart is the Government Attic. This is a truly amazing site in which to "rummage." The site has posted thousands of documents(!) from their many FOIA requests including:
- FOIA logs (FOIAs about FOIAs are really handy!)
- documents across a wide swath of government activity like Inspector Generals of various agencies
- internal agency Websites
- agencies' self-identified interesting documents
- FBI high visibility memos
- DoD resale activities border review (reviews which videos and magazines could be sold on military bases)
- a compilation of FBI documents concerning the security of telephone services, 1952-1995 (this one was so interesting that I have stored a local copy and had it cataloged for our library!).
The Cutest Little Spy Plane
Government documents can contain the oddest things! The CIA declassified its U2 flight handbook in 2012. Graphic designer Jack Curry noticed something "delightful" about the manual: "little cartoons of an anthropomorphized U2 at the beginning of each section" and posted copies of them on his personal blog.
- The Cutest Little Spy Plane by Jack Curry. (October 3, 2013)
- Utility Flight Handbook "Secret U2 Flight Handbook" (PDF, 295pp) (March 1, 1959).