FRASER adds new Marriner S. Eccles Document collection on economic history and the Fed
The St Louis Fed's FRASER (Federal Reserve Archive) has just announced the addition of the new Marriner S. Eccles Document collection. It looks to be especially relevant to economic historians and those interested in economics and the [w:Great Depression].
FRASER, a digital library dedicated to preserving the nation’s economic history, recently added the Marriner S. Eccles Document Collection. The new collection provides access to nearly 10,000 documents from the archival collection housed by the University of Utah. Eccles served as Chairman (1934-48) and member (1948-51) of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The collection provides research material about the Federal Reserve System, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s, as well as Eccles’s role in the monetary and fiscal systems of the United States during those years. The documents can be browsed and searched by box, date, author, or keyword (the keyword field searches title, author, and description). Full-text searching is also available through a site-level advanced search, which can be narrowed to only items in the Eccles collection. Other archival collections that have been made digitally available on FRASER include Papers from the Committee on the History of the Federal Reserve System (held by the Brookings Institution) and the William McChesney Martin Jr. Document Collection (held by the Missouri Historical Society). FRASER has more than 640 publication titles, dated from 1789 to the present, that can be browsed by title, author, date, or topic. Full-text searching is also available.Continue reading
Ezra Klein explains daily treasury real yield curve rates
On yesterday's Rachel Maddow show, I was excited to see the Washington Post's Ezra Klein (hosting for Ms Maddow while she's on vacation) use a government document to make a very cogent point. In discussing a story by the NY Times "Weather Extremes Leave Parts of U.S. Grid Buckling", Klein opined that now is the perfect time for the Federal government to spend on infrastructure projects. He explained that the US Treasury's Daily Treasury Real Yield Curve Rates are currently negative. That is, people are buying treasury bonds knowing full well that the return will be less than the original price of the treasury bond. Therefore, the US Congress refusing to spend on badly needed infrastructure rejuvenation (see NY Times article above) is "financial mismanagement on an epic scale!"
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State Agency Databases Activity Report 7/27/2012
Looks like our last activity report for the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project was 7/1/2012. What's happened since then? Well, our project was named one of the Best Free Reference Web Sites 2012 by ALA's Reference and User Services Association's Emerging Technologies in Reference Section (MARS). Our group of four dozen volunteers is honored to mentioned on the same page as the FBI Vault, Google's Art Project and the Encyclopedia of Life. While honors were being handed out, our volunteer documents specialists kept busy. Many URLs were fixed and a number of databases, particularly for California were added. Here is a sample of what was added in the last month: CALIFORNIA (Joel Rane) Online Archive of American Folk Medicine - A searchable database of over a million folk remedies, collected from individuals and books since the 1940s. The remedies are searchable by condition, belief, method of treatment, gender, age and ethnicity of the informant, place, date and region collected, place or region of origin, and the citation name. OHIO (Audrey Hall) Ohio Judicial Conference Directory - Directory with information for all Ohio judges. Find contact information for judges by name, county and court. WISCONSIN (Barbara Bren) Credential Search Menu - allows consumers to search for individuals and businesses that are credentialed. You can search by name, credential type, credential id or by zip code. These lists certify who has been granted a permit from the state. They may or may not signify a particular level of training or success in passing an examination. Continue reading
Kudos for GPO: Video streaming from Interagency Depository Seminar
The Interagency Depository Seminar is a week long event regarded by most of the librarians we know as one of the best events a government information specialist can attend. As the name implies, instructors from other agencies come and provide in-depth training and insight into the information products from their agencies. Traditionally this has been an in-person event. For the first time this year, GPO will be webcasting parts of the event, according to this e-mail sent to the FDLP-L list:
From: Announcements from the Federal Depository Library Program [mailto:GPO-FDLP-L@LISTSERV.ACCESS.GPO.GOV] On Behalf Of FDLP Listserv Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2012 11:23 AM To: GPO-FDLP-L@LISTSERV.ACCESS.GPO.GOV Subject: Join the Interagency Depository Seminar from Afar! Next week for the first time, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) will provide remote access to portions of the Interagency Depository Seminar. The virtual sessions are free, but registration is required. Register now and join us live for four segments of the Seminar: 07/30/2012 -- Monday morning: 8:30 AM - Noon (Eastern Time) * Welcome & Introductions * History of GPO * LTIS Update * Education & Outreach Register: http://login.icohere.com/registration/register.cfm?reg=270&evt=IADS-Monday-AM 07/30/2012 -- Monday afternoon: 1:30 PM - 4:00 PM (Eastern Time) * Federal Reserve Bank's FRASER, FRED, and ALFRED * DSIMS: Depository Selection Information Management System Register: http://login.icohere.com/registration/register.cfm?reg=271&evt=IADS-Monday-PM 08/02/2012 -- Thursday afternoon: 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM (Eastern Time) * U.S. Geological Survey * U.S. Department of State * National Agricultural Library * National Library of Medicine Register: http://login.icohere.com/registration/register.cfm?reg=272&evt=IADS-Thurs-PM 08/03/2012 -- Friday morning: 8:30 AM - 12:30 PM (Eastern Time) * Introduction to GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys) * Advanced Navigation in GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys) * Closing Remarks and Adjourn Register: http://login.icohere.com/registration/register.cfm?reg=273&evt=IADS-Friday-AM Once your registration is completed, you will receive a confirmation email with instructions for logging into the virtual Interagency Depository Seminar sessions. Virtual attendees will receive certificates of participation. Contact Cindy Etkin (cetkin@gpo.gov) if you have questions.We at FGI have long advocated for more distance training opportunities for government documents librarians and other government information stakeholders. We haven't been alone. And for the past few years, the Government Printing Office has been listening. This latest advance comes on the heels of a number of online classes for FDSys and other Federal resources. Thanks GPO for continuing to expand opportunities for librarians and other staff not available to travel. We especially appreciate you webcasting from your signature training event! Continue reading
US Executive Branch Closure Crawl
The State of the Federal Web Report issued in late 2011 noted that Federal agencies planned to eliminate or merge several hundred domains, as part of the President's Campaign to Cut Waste. The goal was to reduce outdated, redundant, and inactive domains. As part of this work, the .gov Task Force overseeing the process asked members of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) to archive and preserve all .gov Executive branch domains slated to be decommissioned or merged. NDSA members immediately agreed that an important step in this process was to preserve the content of these sites as part of our national digital heritage - instead of simply eliminating them. Rather than start a separate, standalone project, we chose to launch a collaborative crawl under the auspices of the End of Term Web Archive project (EOT). Although the EOT project has primarily focused on transitions occurring at the end of administrative terms, part of the goal of the project is to document changes in all online presences of the US Federal government during key periods of transition, regardless of when or under what circumstances they occur. So, a comprehensive harvest, using a targeted list of domains supplied by the .gov Task Force and a general list of all Executive branch domains downloaded from data.gov, began on Saturday, October 8, 2011. The crawl concluded on November 5, 2011 and encompassed 46,278,384 captures and ~13TBs of data compressed. Here's a general outline of the sequence of events of the Fall 2011 crawl:
- Agencies identified recommended actions for domains in their Interim Progress Reports and Web Inventory
- The .gov Task Force collected a list of outgoing .gov domains and shared those with the NDSA
- Internet Archive crawled outgoing sites and the full suite of Executive branch domains (note: for some resources it took several weeks to crawl sites in their entirety)
- GSA eliminated domains after they were archived