Archives.com Now Providing Access to Some U.S. Census Material and Pledges $5 Million for Future Digitization Projects
Archives.com properties include Fold3.com (formerly Footnote.com) and NewspaperArchive.com. Archives.com is owned by Inflection.com. From an Archives.com Blog Post: Today Archives.com, the web's most affordable and easy-to-use subscription-based family history site, announces the addition of the U.S. Federal Census, the single most valuable collection of U.S. historical records. The U.S. Census collections were made available by FamilySearch International, the world's largest genealogy organization, as part of a joint effort to introduce more records to family historians worldwide. In conjunction with the Census effort, Archives will also embark on a joint project with FamilySearch to digitize tens-of-millions of additional historical records, the majority of which are not currently online. Archives has pledged a minimum of five million dollars to this important project which will positively impact the entire community. [Clip] Archives has integrated the full set of U.S. Federal Population Census indexes from 1790 to 1930 consisting of over 500 million names along with 3 million images from census years 1850, 1870, and 1900. In the near future, the full set of census images will be accessible. Leading the effort is former FamilySearch veteran Anne Roach AG®, CGSM as Director of Content Development. Read the Complete Announcement See Also: Archives.com U.S. Census Info Page They currently provide access to approx. 54 million records and 10 million images. Fyi, a one year subscription to Archive.com costs $39.95. They offer a one-week free trial. See Also: For a Limited Time, 1940 U.S. Census Will Be Free on Ancestry.com Continue reading
New Database: UN Office on Drugs and Crime and World Bank Group Launch New Anti-Corruption Legal Library With Legislation From
From INFOdocket: The UNCAC Legal Library is a comprehensive database of anti-corruption and asset recovery legislation and jurisprudence from over 175 States, systematized in accordance with the requirements of the Convention. The Legal Library, which will be regularly updated, identifies laws that have been successfully used to recover assets as well as barriers to asset recovery caused by inadequate or incompatible legal frameworks. This practical and user-friendly resource will aid countries as they design and improve their legal frameworks so that these are more conducive to the recovery of stolen assets. Finally, you'll find a link to background about the new TRACK (Tools and Resources for Anti-Corruption Knowledge) portal also from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Continue reading
AALL Government Relations Policy
Thank you, James, for the opportunity to guest blog. I look forward to sharing information and telling stories. We'll see how September unfolds. In July, the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Executive Board approved a new Government Relations Policy. The policy covers the dissemination of government information, as well as intellectual property, privacy, and preservation. I hope to blog about some of these issues in the future, but reading through revised policy, I was most pleased to see a new section (Section VII) on support for law libraries. AALL calls for adequate funding for the FDLP and state depository programs, as it always has, but there is a new emphasis on strong support for public law libraries, including state, courthouse, county, and local libraries. I've spent 20 years at an academic law library that is open to the public. We have a public mission, as a state institution and as a depository library. We provide reference services, and print and electronic collections to the public, which includes self-represented persons. But our primary purpose is to support the research and curricular needs of the University of Washington School of Law faculty and students. Although we serve many people without lawyers, it's the public law libraries of our state and region, most notably the King County Law Library, that are truly on the front lines of providing access to justice. These important, and often fragile, parts of our government and legal information ecosystem deserve strong support. Continue reading
Archiving the Web
A new article in Times Higher Education (THE), calls attention to the need for archiving the web and the difficulties of doing it.
- Memory failure detected, Times Higher Education, (Sept. 1, 2011). "We are taking it for granted that such material will be there, but we need to be attentive. We have a responsibility to future generations of researchers." ...While libraries are currently digitising 19th-century documents and making them available via the web, it is "deeply ironic" that websites from two years ago are being made less accessible, Meyer notes.
- Meyer, Eric T., Thomas, Arthur and Schroeder, Ralph, Web Archives: The Future(s) (June 30, 2011). In this report, the authors consider the possible future uses of web archives. This report is structured first, to engage in some speculative thought about the possible futures of the web as an exercise in prompting us to think about what we need to do now in order to make sure that we can reliably and fruitfully use archives of the web in the future. Next, we turn to considering the methods and tools being used to research the live web, as a pointer to the types of things that can be developed to help understand the archived web. Then, we turn to a series of topics and questions that researchers want or may want to address using the archived web. In this final section, we tentatively identify some of the short, medium and long term challenges individuals, organizations, and international bodies can target to increase our ability to explore these topics and answer these questions.
New book on Top Secret America
Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have a new book, Top Secret America based on their series of stories that appeared in the Washington Post in July 2010. The book describes "the new American security state." Steven Aftergood has a brief overview of the book:
- A Spotlight on "Top Secret America", Secrecy News (September 1, 2011). Since 9/11 ... some 33 large office complexes for top secret intelligence work have been completed in the Washington DC area, the equivalent in size of nearly three Pentagons. More than 250,000 contractors are working on top secret programs. A bewildering number of agencies -- more than a thousand -- have been created to execute security policy, including at least 24 new organizations last year alone.... But the vast scale of this activity says nothing about its quality or utility. The authors, who are scrupulous in their presentation of the facts, are critical in their evaluation: "One of the greatest secrets of Top Secret America is its disturbing dysfunction."