Nominate your 2010 notable government documents now!
Please help out the government documents community. Each year the Notable Documents Panel of the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) selects titles issued by intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and governments at all levels and highlights them in a May Library Journal article -- here's last year's notable documents article. If you see a government document, web site, database, or other information resource issued since January 2010 that merits attention, please take a few minutes to nominate it. Works in all formats are fair game, as are items published for governments and IGOs by private publishers. Nominate early, nominate often! Deadline is January 15, 2011. Continue reading
Fed posts data on the financial crisis
The Federal Reserve released documents that identify the recipients of $3.3 trillion in emergency aid provided at the height of the financial crisis. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform And Consumer Protection Act (Public Law 111-203) required the release of this information, which had been secret. A lot has been written about this, but here are some of the links I have found particularly interesting. (Thanks to Gary and ResourceShelf for many of these tips!).
- FRB: Regulatory Reform: Transaction Data, Federal Reserve Board (The data.)
- Federal Reserve releases detailed information about transactions conducted to stabilize markets during the recent financial crisis, Sabrina I. Pacifici, BeSpacific. (Sabrina's summary of what the Fed has put online.)
- Inured to “Trillions”, By Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review. (CJR has some of the most interesting coverage, summarizing the facts and the analysis coming from journalists.)
- Audit Notes: The Federal Reserve’s Trillion-Dollar Bailout Document Dump, By Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review. (With links to more news coverage and evaluations of the data.)
- Audit Notes: Too Big to Fail Edition, By Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review. (CJR does more analysis of the analyses.)
- A Real Jaw Dropper at the Federal Reserve, by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Huffington Post. (Sanders, who wrote the amendment to the Dodd-Frank Bill that required the disclosure, gives his first take on the data.)
- Interactive: Which Banks Got Emergency Loans from the Fed During the Financial Meltdown?, By Karen Weise and Dan Nguyen, ProPublica. (ProPublica's interactive mashup of the data.)
- Fed Emergency Lending , Wall Street Journal (The WSJ's mashup of the data.)
- Decoding the Fed’s Emergency Programs, Wall Street Journal. (The WSJ explains some of the details.)
FCC Commissioner Copps: “Getting Media Right: A Call To Action”
Getting Media Right: A Call To Action, FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps, Columbia University School Of Journalism, New York City (December 2, 2010). Libraries and Journalism have a lot in common. Copps presents specific recommendations to deal with what he calls the "hour of grave peril" of American Journalism.
The place where I work -- the Federal Communications Commission -- blessed it all, encouraged the consolidation mania, and went beyond even that to eviscerate just about every public interest responsibility that generations of reformers had fought for and won in radio and TV. One FCC Chairman summed up the agency's attitude that there was nothing special about the media by saying, "a television set is nothing but a toaster with pictures." So much for the people's airwaves and for any semblance of concern for the fragile news and information infrastructure that is the lifeblood of society's conversation with itself.Hat tip to Kevin Taglang! Continue reading
CRS may be harmed by blocked access to Wikileaks
Blocking Access to Wikileaks May Harm CRS, Analysts Say, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News(December 6, 2010).
“It’s a difficult situation,” said one CRS analyst. “The information was released illegally, and it’s not right for government agencies to be aiding and abetting this illegal dissemination. But the information is out there. Presumably, any Library of Congress researcher who wants to access the information that Wikileaks illegally released will simply use their home computers or cellphones to do so. Will they be able to refer directly to the information in their writings for the Library? Apparently not, unless a secondary source, like a newspaper, happens to have already cited it.”Continue reading
Lostdocs Spreadsheet of Fugitives Cataloged by GPO Now Available
In the past year or so that we have been tracking lost docs/document discovery reports, we've been made aware of 67 publications that appear to have been cataloged by the Government Printing Office in response to a lost docs report. We've created a spreadsheet of documents with the date reported and the date of the CGP catalog record. We have now made this spreadsheet public at https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjA1ChZ8rDu5dGw0VllsRHpqSk1HcXctM1dMQVlBMWc&hl=en and will keep it up to date. A few cautions in using data from this spreadsheet: 1) This is probably not the full list of items cataloged in response to lost docs reports. We check the cataloging status of documents the month after they are posted. This catches some, but not all items eventually cataloged. Ideally we'd have someone run the entire list of fugitive and pending documents through the CGP once a aweek, but we don't have staffing for that. If you'd like like to volunteer, send a note to dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net. 2) We have no way of knowing for sure that a given item was cataloged in response to a specific report. 3) Although the spreadsheet offers an average and median number of days to catalog a document, those figures are only for the publications on the spreadsheet. Since we don't get notified of all the documents reported as fugitive to GPO nor all of our reports that eventually get cataloged, we can't come up with an actual solid figure for how long it takes GPO to acquire and catalog items. Our sample of 67 as of 12/4/2010 may or may not be representative. But at least it's a place to start until GPO starts publishing their own fugitive document/document discovery statistics. Continue reading