The 1967 Census of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: A Digitized Version
Here is an interesting set of census data, digitized from print. The dataset documentation (The 1967 Census Of The West Bank And Gaza Strip: A Digitized Version Dataset Documentation, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Joel Perlmann, Project Director, November 2011) also presents a detailed description of the methods used to create accurate, usable, digital statistical tables from print.
- The 1967 Census of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: A Digitized Version, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. In the summer of 1967, just after the Six-Day War brought the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli control, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS) supervised a census in these territories. The census included an impressive array of questions about individuals, households, and the quality of residences—about age, sex, religion, place of residence, educational attainment, occupation, industrial sector, income, household structure, health, female fertility, and housing conditions. Moreover, it asked two crucial questions about refugee status: Had the individual lived prior to the 1948 War in the area that became the State of Israel? And, Was the individual living in or outside of a refugee camp at the time the census was taken? The ICBS prepared seven volumes of reports based on this enumeration—the first modern census reports on the Palestinian population. Yet these volumes have not been used extensively in the writing on the evolution of the occupied territories. One reason is that they are not widely available, and even when at hand they are subject to all the limitations of older volumes published as quickly as possible in order to be of use at the time. For this reason, the Levy Economics Institute is offering, for the first time and free of charge, the content of six of these volumes (the seventh to be added shortly) in machine-readable form, in the hope that the data can be exploited by researchers interested in a fuller understanding of the social history of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories. Bard student volunteers contributed appreciably to this project.
Reminder: legacy American FactFinder to be discontinued January 20, 2012
Just a reminder to all my docs librarian peeps: The American FactFinder's old interface (which many think is easier to use than their new interface!) is going away and American FactFinder2 will be the default interface to access data and statistics from the US Census Bureau. I hope FactFinder2 will make links to the 1990 census and older data sets (see the list below) VERY transparent. It's a real shame that those older data sets won't be accessible via the new search interface but only via FTP.
The Census Bureau will be ending the legacy version of American FactFinder on January 20. Any deep links into the discontinued system will no longer work, including links to:Continue readingThese products will only be available through an archived FTP format. All other current and previous year data from the American Community Survey, Puerto Rico Community Survey, Annual Population Estimates, Economic Census, and Annual Economic Surveys are available in the new American FactFinder. Access the how-to guide for Building Deep Links into the New American Factfinder to learn how to create links.
- 1990 Census
- 2000-2004 American Community Survey
- 2000-2001 Supplementary Survey
- 1997 Economic Census
- 2003 Annual Survey of Manufactures
- 2003 Nonemployer Statistics
USDA reverses decision to stop farm reports. Hear that Census Bureau?
The NY Times reported yesterday that the USDA has reversed a decision to end farming reports. Evidently, when an industry group(s) complains, the US Govt listens. So why hasn't the Census Bureau changed their decision on killing the US Statistical Abstract?
In an abrupt about-face, the United States Department of Agriculture has decided to reverse a decision to eliminate dozens of long-standing statistical reports on a wide range of farming activities, including beekeeping, hop growing and flower farming. The agency’s statistics service said in October that it was forced by budget constraints to cut the reports and that doing so would save $11 million a year. That led to an outcry from farm groups that said the information collected by the agency was essential. Farmers rely on the reports to decide how much to plant and how many animals to raise; they use the information to persuade bankers to lend them money and to advocate for other types of government support. So now the Agriculture Department has reinstated most of the reports that had been given the ax. Saved are the reports on trout farming, catfish farming, floriculture, sheep and goats, bees and honey production and mink farming, among others. Mitt Walker, director of the Alabama Catfish Producers, said the sudden switch was probably “a result of the outcry from the affected commodities,” a reference to farm trade groups.Continue reading
EFF: 2011 is the year secrecy jumped the shark
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in their year in review, summed up 2011 as the year that secrecy [w:jumped the shark]. A sad state of affairs for the Obama Administration, which was supposed to be the most transparent ever.
- Government report concludes the government classified 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase on the year before. The number of people with security clearances exceeded 4.2. million, more people than the city of Los Angeles.
- Government tells Air Force families, including their kids, it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks. The month before, the Air Force barred its service members fighting abroad from reading the New York Times—the country’s Paper of Record.
- Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were barred from reading the WikiLeaks Guantanamo files, despite their contents being plastered on the front page of the New York Times.
- President Obama refuses to say the words “drone” or “C.I.A” despite the C.I.A. drone program being on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers every day.
- CIA refuses to release even a single passage from its center studying global warming, claiming it would damage national security. As Secrecy News' Steven Aftergood said, “That’s a familiar song, and it became tiresome long ago.”
- The CIA demands former FBI agent Ali Soufan censor his book criticizing the CIA’s post 9/11 interrogation tactics of terrorism suspects. Much of the material, according to the New York Times, “has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.”
- Department of Homeland Security has become so bloated with secrecy that even the “office's budget, including how many employees and contractors it has, is classified,” according to the Center for Investigative reporting. Yet their intelligence reports “produce almost nothing you can’t find on Google,” said a former undersecretary.
- Headline from the Wall Street Journal in September: “Anonymous US officials push open government.”
- NSA declassified a 200 year old report which they said demonstrated its “commitment to meeting the requirements” of President Obama’s transparency agenda. Unfortunately, the document “had not met the government's own standards for classification in the first place,” according to J. William Leonard, former classification czar.
- Government finally declassifies the Pentagon Papers 40 years after they appeared on the front page of the New York Times and were published by the House’s Armed Services Committee.
- Secrecy expert Steve Aftergood concludes after two years “An Obama Administration initiative to curb overclassification of national security information… has produced no known results to date.”
- President Obama accepts a transparency award…behind closed doors.
- Government attorneys insist in court they can censor a book which was already published and freely available online.
- Department of Justice refuses to release its interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act, a public law.
- U.S. refuses to release its legal justification for killing an American citizen abroad without a trial, despite announcing the killing in a press conference.
- U.S. won’t declassify legal opinion on 2001’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program.
- National Archive announced it was working on declassifying “a backlog of nearly 400 million pages of material that should have been declassified a long time ago.”
- The CIA refused to declassify Open Source Works, “which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information” according to Steve Aftergood.
- Twenty-three year State Department veteran gets his security clearance revoked for linking to a WikiLeaks document on his blog.
- The ACLU sued asking the State Department to declassify 23 cables out of the more than 250,000 released by WikiLeaks. After more than a year, the government withheld 12 in their entirety. You can see the other 11, heavily redacted, next to the unredacted copies on the ACLU website.
- The ACLU said it sued the State Department in part to show the "absurdity of the US secrecy regime." Mission accomplished.
Achieving a collaborative FDLP future (#FDLP)
December 23, 2011 / 1 Comment on Achieving a collaborative FDLP future (#FDLP)
Note: This post is a longer response to a recent comments left on the LJ article written by Jim A. Jacobs and Melody Kelly.
Recently, Library Journal published a short article that Melody Kelly and I wrote (The Future of the FDLP: From Conversation to Confrontation). In such a short opinion piece, we did not have the space to document our arguments and expand on our reasoning. Since the article was posted, it has received a few comments. So we are using this post to expand on our LJ piece a bit and re-post here our replies to those comments.
As we said in LJ, the discussions about shared regional depositories have morphed from a conversation into a confrontation. This was our main point. As Daniel Cornwall said here recently, just as GPO needs to work with FDLP, so all FDLP libraries should be working with GPO, not working against it. We are concerned that the tactics adopted by ARL and many of the association's prominent members are more confrontational than cooperative and that such tactics may harm GPO at a time when it needs our support.
Some of the issues involved are complex and confusing and we imagine that many non-FDLP librarians -- and even some in the FDLP community -- find it difficult to follow the sometimes arcane, legal details of the arguments on both sides. This is particularly true when attempts are made outside the current GPO rules to redefine the scope or procedures of an existing Regional.
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