State Agency Databases Activity Report: September 17, 2011
The past few weeks have been a busy time at the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. Part of what has kept us busy was the first official quarterly "link check" of our pages. This is a new initiative designed to keep project pages fresh. Thanks to the many volunteers who spent the last week checking and fixing page links and posting the date of link checking to their page. ORPHAN NEWS A big thank you to Carlos A. Diaz for adopting Mississippi. He fixed all the broken links and added a number of new resources. Now the official list of unadopted orphans stands at just two Rhode Island and Texas. I still think it would be a public service for someone to adopt Gov. Rick Perry's home and expand the list of Texas databases in order to provide a broader view of the Texas record. I'd do it if I didn't have Arizona in addition to Alaska. If you're a librarian in either Texas or Rhode Island, I'd really appreciate it if you would forward this message to appropriate listservs in your state. If you're interested in either Texas or Rhode Island, check out our volunteer guide at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/SADATFS_Volunteer_Guide and then send me an e-mail if you'd like to adopt one of the above states. If you adopt a state, be prepared to put your name and contact information on the main project page AND your state page within two weeks of receiving your wiki login. See the Volunteer Guide for more details. TRANSFER NEWS Not sure if this was mentioned in a previous report, but Liz Paulus has taken over the Oregon page. WIKI ACTIVITY See our last seven days of activity at http://tinyurl.com/statedbs for a blow by blow description of changes to the page. Here are a few highlights: DATABASES ADDED CALIFORNIA (Joel Rane) Publicly Traded Disclosure Search - This search allows you to search for all publicly traded corporations that have filed a Corporate Disclosure Statement with the Secretary of State, search the full text of information contained in a specific statement, and view abstracts of reported information. Searchable by corporation name, the names of officers, or an auditor name; there is also an advanced search. INDIANA (Kimberly Brown-Harden) Oral Arguments Online - Oral arguments are webcast live and are available in Windows Media format. The link to view a live webcast will be available two minutes prior to the start time of an argument, and no sooner, unless the courtroom proceedings are delayed. The link to the archived video and the audio podcast (if available) will be accessible two hours after the start time of the hearing. Can search the arguments by keyword, title, case number, summary, etc. Also able to browse by year,court, month, and county. MISSISSIPPI (CARLOS A. DIAZ) Market Development Company Search - This database is part of the Make Mine Mississippi marketing campaign so people can get in touch with Mississippi companies. CHANGES TO SUBJECT PAGES BIOGRAPHICAL DATABASES North Carolina Builders & Architects: A Biographical Dictionary - This biographical dictionary highlights architects and builders who have produced North Carolina's architecture for more than 300 years. Clicking on "show more options" opens up Gender, Race, Trade, Styles & Forms, Building Types, and "Flourished Dates." Records includes locations where the builders and architects did projects. Continue reading
Senate legislative appropriations released. Future for GPO and FDLP in doubt
Last month the House released its legislative appropriations ("Privatization of GPO, Defunding of FDsys, and the Future of the FDLP"). As we noted then, "the future of long-term preservation of and free access to government information is in the hands of Congress today." And it doesn't look any better today with the release of the Senate's legislative appropriations markup, S.Rept. 112-080 (see p.42 - 44). The Senate added $500,000 to the House's revolving fund appropriations of ZERO (GPO had requested $6million!) -- but looks to be thinking that FDsys funding will come from there (GPO requested $6million for FDsys!) -- added around $6.8 million to congressional binding and printing and kept $35 million for salary and expenses for the Superintendent of Documents -- the same amount as the House. There's none of that restructuring language in the House appropriations (requesting GAO to research the efficacy of GPO privatization and splitting functions between LC and GSA). The Senate is recommending a 12.4 percent reduction in overall funding for the GPO from the fiscal year 2011 enacted level, which is only slightly less ugly than the 20% reduction recommended by the House. Please call, write and email your Senators TODAY and express your support for FULL GPO funding, *especially* if you happen to live in a state whose Senator sits on the Appropriations Committee. Continue reading
The Pentagon Papers: All Three Versions Posted Allowing Side-by-Side Comparison
The National Security Archive at George Washington University announced today that they have posted all three major editions of the Pentagon Papers.
- Complete Pentagon Papers At Last!, National Security Archive, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 359, (September 16, 2011) Edited By John Prados. For the first time ever, all three major editions of the Pentagon Papers are being made available simultaneously online. The posting today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org), allows for a unique side-by-side comparison, showing readers exactly what the U.S. government tried to hide for 40 years by means of deletions from the original text. Today's posting includes the full texts of the "Gravel" edition entered into Congressional proceedings in 1971 by Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) and later published by the Beacon Press, the authorized 1971 declassified version issued by the House Armed Services Committee with deletions insisted on by the Nixon administration, and the new 2011 "complete" edition released in June by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
Deepwater Horizon final report and a comment on how to (and how NOT to) post digital documents
[UPDATE: several people have let me know that the link to Volume 1 of the report is dead. I've posted it to dropbox for now (have patience, it's 21MB!) and will update this post when I get a response from the Coast Guard. That raises *another* issue: the link to volume 1 on the coast guard site is a *dynamic* link (you can see the sessionID in the url). That means when the session ends, the link is dead. Documents NEED to have permanent links. One way to assure that is to send the document to the GPO for cataloging!. More soon.] Yesterday, the Deepwater Horizon joint investigation team Released its final Report. According to the Wall Street Journal:
Federal investigators released their final report Wednesday into the causes of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico last year, castigating oil giant BP PLC and its contractors for their risky decisions and criticizing the government itself for gaps in oversight.The report contains dozens of recommendations for improving off-shore oil drilling; but that's not really what I want to talk about. As a govt documents librarian, my concern is instead with *HOW* the report was released and its implications for trusted government information. Here are a few of the questions or issues that I have:
- Why did the committee created to do the work -- a joint task force between the Department of Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) and the U.S. Coast Guard -- create a separate .com site (http://deepwaterjointinvestigation.com) rather than doing/posting their work on the BOEMRE.gov site -- or at least requesting a .gov domain from General Services Administration (GSA)?
- Why was the report released on both the BOEMRE site as well as the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) site? The fact that it's on both .gov and .com sites calls into question the authenticity of the report -- and GPO has been very strong on digital authenticity and digital signatures of key govt documents to verify chain of custody and document integrity.
- Further, why were the actual documents themselves (The Adm. Papp/Director Bromwich Cover Memo, volume 1, volume 2, and appendices) were posted on different sites -- cover memo, volume 2 and appendices on BOEMRE's .gov site and volume 1 on the Coast Guard's .mil site. And why were there redacted versions posted on the Coast Guard's site (look at the file names) and unredacted versions posted on BOEMRE and the joint taskforce site?!
- Lastly -- and this one particularly irked me because it blocked me from actually preserving the document in the Stanford Digital Repository -- why was volume 1 of the report (the part posted on the Coast Guard's .mil site) posted as a PDF with password security in place? I needed to combine the separate PDFs ( (memo, volume 1, volume 2 and appendices) into 1 file in order to save it in the Stanford Digital Repository (for more on that workflow, see the briefing of Everyday Electronic Materials (EEMs) that my colleague Katherine Kott did at CNI in Fall, 2010). But because it was posted as a "secure" PDF, I was blocked from extracting pages or assembling the PDF together.
- DO post them to a .gov site AND send a copy to the GPO so they can be cataloged and the bibliographic records can be distributed to federal depository libraries for more widespread access
- DO post the documents on the same domain as the press release
- DO give users a choice for large documents: downloading multiple files for specific pieces of a report AND downloading the report in its entirety as 1 file
- DO NOT put any sort of digital rights management on public domain govt publications (I can't stress this point too strongly!)
The Founder’s Constitution (In Honor of Constitution Day)
Much primary and historical material relating to the enactment of the U.S. Constitution is online. The Library of Congress Primary Documents in American History collection and Yale Law School’s Avalon Project’s The American Constitution – A Documentary Record are well-known and well-used. But in honor of Constitution Day, I’d like to highlight The Founder’s Constitution, the freely available web edition of the five-volume anthology published in 1987 by the University of Chicago Press. Although the web edition is searchable, and has material organized by theme, a most useful feature is the organization by clause. I’ve been thinking about redistricting, since Washington is gaining a Congressional seat, and the first set of maps drawn by the four voting members of the State Redistricting Commission were released this week. So I went to The Founder’s Constitution, clicked on Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3, and found a collection of links directly to writings on point. I stopped there, but if I had the time and need, I could have explored the “see also” references. The set is indexed by case name, author and document, and constitutional provision. On a related note, although the University of Washington’s Constitution Day website is up, the big event, to me at least, is later in the fall when all the students are on back on campus: the “read aloud.” Sponsored by the UW Libraries and organized by US Documents Librarian Cass Hartnett, “UW Reads the US Constitution” is always moving and often surprising. It’s funny how each year I seem to hear new language, or hear it in a new way. I love that new readers sign up, and I love the core of old-timers. I love that people show up at all. It’s the best lunch hour of year. Continue reading