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
Towson University library *joins* the FDLP!
Here's some good news for the FDLP! After years of hearing about how the FDLP is bleeding member libraries -- despite the reality that 99% of FDLP libraries planned to stay in the program as of the 2009 FDLP Biennial Survey! -- the FDLP welcomes new member Albert S. Cook library at Towson University. Congressman Sarbanes and Public Printer Boarman To Speak at Towson University Event (PDF)
WHO: Rep. John P. Sarbanes (MD-3) Public Printer William J. Boarman Towson University Interim President Dr. Marcia Welsh Dean of University Libraries Deborah A. Nolan WHAT: Rep. John P. Sarbanes and Public Printer William J. Boarman will speak at an event at Towson University welcoming the university's Albert S. Cook Library into the U.S. Government Printing Office's (GPO) Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). Through the FDLP, GPO partners with 1,220 libraries nationwide to provide free public access to published information of all three branches of the Government. The university will have access to thousands of documents of Federal Government information to share with the public, faculty, students, and staff of Towson University. Some of those documents include: the U.S. Code, Code of Federal Regulations, Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents. This event will kick-off Towson University's Constitution Week celebration. WHEN: September 19, 2011 11:00am WHERE: Albert S. Cook Library Towson University 8000 York Road Towson, Maryland 21252Continue reading
PACER Fee (and Exemption) Increase
[Update: 9/15/11: One of my colleagues, who is preparing to teach a class on PACER, called the PACER Service Center to verify the date of the fee increase. She was told "April 2012." I then called and was told "the spring billing cycle." I suggested that information be posted on the web site, since the press release implies a much earlier date. -prj] The Judicial Conference of the United States today
authorized an increase in the Judiciary's electronic public access fee in response to increasing costs for maintaining and enhancing the electronic public access system. The increase in the electronic public access (EPA) fee, from $.08 to $.10 per, is needed to continue to support and improve the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system, and to develop and implement the next generation of the Judiciary's Case Management/Electronic Case Filing system.but
The Conference was mindful of the impact such an increase could have on other public entities and on public users accessing the system to obtain information on a particular case. For this reason, local, state, and federal government agencies will be exempted from the increase for three years. Moreover, PACER users who do not accrue charges of more than $15 in a quarterly billing cycle would not be charged a fee. (The current exemption is $10 per quarter.) The expanded exemption means that 75 to 80 percent of all users will still pay no fees.The fee increase is effective November 1, 2011. FGI readers might also be interested in the first part of the press release - the approval of standards and procedures for sealing civil case files. For more, see The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times, "Judicial Conference Urges Restraint in Sealing Civil Cases." Thanks to my colleague, Mary Whisner, for the tip. Continue reading
Nearly a quarter of dot-gov domains don’t work, analysis finds
A new study found many government web sites unreachable. It also discovered that more than one-tenth of the sites are unreachable without the "www" prefix.
- Nearly a quarter of dot-gov domains don't work, analysis finds, By Joseph Marks, NextGov (09/09/2011). An unofficial analysis of the roughly 1,800 top-level federal Web domains shows nearly a quarter of them are now unreachable. That may mean those sites have been shut down or that their content has been consolidated into larger sites in accordance with a White House plan to drastically cut the federal Web presence over the coming year, said Benjamin Balter, a new technology fellow at the Federal Communications Commission and graduate student at The George Washington University who designed the analysis tool as a personal project. ...For simple, run-of-the-mill websites, requiring the "www" prefix typically means the sites are extremely old or unsophisticated. In the case of higher traffic sites such as NASA.gov and FAA.gov it may mean the sites are a complex mesh of public and private information, which makes modernizing the addresses more complicated, Balter said.