Great news! New Bill calls for CRS reports to be publicly available
This is great news indeed! The Sunlight Foundation reported today that the "Public Access to Congressional Research Service Reports Resolution of 2012" (aka H. Res 727) has just been introduced by Representatives Quigley (D-IL) and Lance (R-NJ) -- many thanks to both of them. The resolution would ensure that reports by Congress's $100 million-a-year think tank will become available to the public on a website maintained by the House Clerk. Numerous good government groups and advocates for more congressional transparency -- including FGI! -- have endorsed the measure. Please contact your Representative and ask them to vote HELL YEAH! on H. Res 727.
The reports, prepared by the Congressional Research Service, are frequently cited by the courts and the media and requested by members of the public, but CRS does not release them to the public. Instead, they come to widespread attention after they are released in dribs and drabs by Congressional offices and painstakingly collected by researchers. Some are collected and sold for $20 a copy, while others are made available by non-profit organizations for public consumption. By the time they become publicly available, the reports can become outdated, especially when an issue is moving quickly in Congress. Reliable access to CRS Reports would ensure that everyone has timely and comprehensive access to the collective wisdom of hundreds of analysts and experts on political issues when they're at their most salient. This is already common practice in other support arms of the Congress, like the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office. In the past CRS reports have been more widely available, but relatively recent CRS-imposed policies are increasing limiting access even as the Internet has made the documents easier to share. In fact, the original limitation on public access was imposed in the 1950s on CRS's predecessor agency and arose from a concern about the costs of printing and mailing the reports -- not their confidentiality. In the Internet age, this limitation no longer makes sense, especially as these reports are already available on CRS's internal website in electronic form.Continue reading
2012 End of Term Web Archive: Call for Volunteers
In our first post, we talked about how the End of Term partner institutions joined together in 2008 and 2009 to archive the U.S. government web at the end of the Bush administration. The End of Term project team has resumed for a new 2012-2013 archive, and we need help identifying websites for collection, particularly those that might be most at-risk of change or deletion at the end of the current presidential term. What you can do to help The project team has access to some lists of U.S. Federal government domains and will use those as a baseline list of URLs to crawl. Lists include those of legislative branch domains, including Senator, Representative, legislative committee and leadership web presences, executive branch domains, domains found in directories such as www.USA.gov and www.uscourts.gov, however these lists are often not comprehensive, and we need help identifying URLs to archive. Nominations of any U.S. Federal government domains or URLs are welcome, though there are a few topic areas that we particularly need assistance identifying, including but not limited to: * Judicial Branch websites * Important content or subdomains on very large websites (such as NASA.gov) that might be related to current Presidential policies * Government content on non-government domains (.com, .edu, etc.) Volunteers may contribute as much time and effort as they are able, whether it be a nomination of one website or five hundred sites. Project participants may also want to search the 2008-2009 archive: if we missed something in that earlier archive, it's likely we don't know about it this time around, either! Please nominate any U.S. government URLs you feel would be important to archive. For the last project, we pre-loaded our nomination tool with URLs and then had volunteers help vote things in or out of scope. This time we’re trying a different approach – the nomination tool has not been pre-loaded so whatever is added by our volunteers will be more clearly identified as priority URLs. Websites recommended by volunteers will be prioritized for more frequent and in-depth collection during the course of the project. How to Nominate URLs To contribute a URL to this project, simply visit the Nomination Tool (developed by University of North Texas Libraries) and start entering URLs. Volunteers are asked to submit some basic metadata about the site that they are nominating (title, branch of government, agency), and provide some information about themselves. Project Timeframe Internet Archive will begin a baseline crawl near the end of August, with our other partners crawling various aspects of the government web (depending on their interests) in the Fall of 2012. Websites nominated by our volunteers will be crawled in depth beginning in November and through February, at least. Depending on the outcome of the election, the project team will determine how much and how often to crawl in 2013. Access to the archive will come later. For more details about our proposed schedule, visit the EOT 2012 page on our website. If you have any questions, please contact us at eotproject@loc.gov, here on this blog, or on Twitter @eotarchive. Abbie Grotke Web Archiving Team Lead Library of Congress Cathy Hartman Associate Dean University of North Texas Libraries Continue reading
Results from the NDSA Web Archiving Survey
In fall, 2011, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA)'s Content Working Group conducted a survey of US organizations either actively involved in, or planning to start, programs to archive content from the web. "The goal of the survey was to better understand the landscape of web archiving activities in the United States by identifying the organizations involved, the types of web content being preserved, the tools and policies being used, and the types of access being provided." The results of the survey are now available (PDF). The survey questions (PDF) are also available for reference. For a quick snapshot, see the preliminary results posted on the LOC blog.
Continue readingWeb Archiving Activity
The current web archiving activities of the survey respondents was as follows:
- 63% (49 of 77) have an active web archiving program.
- 16% (12 of 77) are actively testing a web archiving program.
- 17% (13 of 77) are planning on pursuing a web archiving program in the near future.
- 4% (3 of 77) formerly managed web archiving programs, but no longer do so.
Chart 1: Status of current web archiving activities.
Interestingly, of the 71 respondents that identified their web archiving goals, 80% (57 of 71) were archiving content “from other organizations or individuals for future research,” 69% (49 of 71) were preserving their own institutional web content, and 49% (35 of 71) were doing both.
In reviewing the full survey results, a number of themes emerged.
The recent emergence of web archiving, especially at academic institutions
One surprising result was the preponderance of universities that have initiated web archiving programs in the last 5 years. Of the 68 respondents that identified the specific year their web archiving began, nearly a third, 32% (22 of 68) began their programs within the last two years, the exact same number of institutions (22, 32%) that began archiving web content in the 17 years between 1989 and 2006. The recent surge in web archiving within the last 5 years – 68% (46 of 68) of those surveyed – is primarily due to universities starting web archiving programs.
Chart 2: Year began archiving web content.
Read the Congressional Record on the go!
Want to read the Congressional Record on the go? Well now you can with this Congressional Record iphone/ipad app created by the Library of Congress under the guidance of the Committee on House Administration. The app pulls data from ?the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Office of the Secretary of the Senate, and the Government Printing Office. With the app, the reader can:
- Browse editions of the Congressional Record by date: January 4, 1995 (the 104th Congress, 1st Session) to the present
- Perform keyword searches within individual documents or sections within documents
- Share documents via email
- Save documents to your preferred iPad PDF reader
- Identify the latest bills and resolutions considered daily on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives
- Identify the latest bills, resolutions, treaties, and nominations considered daily on the floor of the U.S. Senate
Happy Birthday Freedom of Information!
The National Security Archive at George Washington University is marking the anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act with a special post:
- Happy 46th Birthday, Freedom of Information!, National Security Archive (July 4, 2012). Marking the 46th anniversary of President Johnson's signing the Freedom of Information Act, the National Security Archive today posted a compilation of 46 news headlines from the past year made possible by active and creative use of the FOIA. This representative sample, drawn from hundreds of FOIA stories reported by newspapers, blogs, broadcasters, and researchers, describe FOIA requests that revealed the theft of Jack Daniels whiskey by airport security screeners, the keywords used by homeland security officials to monitor social networking sites, the soil contamination endangering Marines and their families at Camp Lejeune, pre-9/11 attempts to whack Osama bin Laden, and $1.2 trillion of secret Federal Reserve loans to banks, among dozens of other topics that the public has a right and a need to know.