Presidential Policy Directives not on White House Website
Steven Aftergood describes Presidential Policy Directives and discusses how and why they are not usually posted to the White House website -- even when they are not classified and are available elsewhere.
- Presidential Directives Mostly Withheld by White House, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (July 12, 2013). The Obama Administration has issued more than 20 Presidential Policy Directives (PPDs), many of which are collected or listed on the Federation of American Scientists web site. But with few exceptions (PPD 14, PPD 19) most of these cannot be obtained from the White House.
Healthcare.gov: The Innovative Development of a .gov Website
In October, the healthcare.gov website will be the site millions of Americans use to choose their health insurance. The new site has been built in public for months, iteratively created on Github using cutting edge open-source technologies. Healthcare.gov is the rarest of birds: a next-generation website that also happens to be a .gov. It will use Jekyll, which allows developers to build a static website from dynamic components. This will make the website faster and more efficient. A fascinating story! Continue reading
State Agency Databases Activity Report 7/7/2013
While we haven't posted a report for awhile, activity has been buzzing at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. For a full listing of the activity for the past two weeks, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs14d. Here are some highlights: DATABASES ADDED DELAWARE (John Stevenson) Delaware Public Archives Collection Gateway - Search indexes of some of the public collections by name or keyword. Collection descriptions are added or updated quarterly. GEORGIA (Chris Sharpe) Wage and Salary Survey - Search the results of the most recent three years the DCA Wage and Salary Survey. Information includes the pay range, number of full time employees, and the number of hours worked each week for over 160 different local government jobs. MASSACHUSETTS (Jennifer Ekblaw) Continue reading
ALA draft resolutions dealing with govt documents. Tell your ALA Councilor to support #ALA2013
There are several draft ALA resolutions having to do with government information kicking around ALA 2013 annual conference. While there's still a way to go before these resolutions are passed by ALA Council, I thought folks might be interested enough in these to grab their nearest ALA Councilor and tell them to vote for these resolutions in support of free government information, open government and transparency. They're important to both libraries AND the public!! I've heard that the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT) has 2 resolutions dealing with Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and the importance of whistleblowers to open government and the democratic process. But I haven't yet seen the text for these two. Continue reading
Who Pays for Access and Preservation?
July 1, 2013 / 2 Comments on Who Pays for Access and Preservation?
A recent battle in the California Legislature over public records has a lesson for all of us who work with government information. A story in the Los Angeles Times sums up the issue exactly: "In the end it wasn’t really about public records or the people’s right to see them. It was about money." Continue reading →
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