Historians Highlight Humor
We have mentioned the Government Comics Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Library before, including its selection as a Digital Library of the Week by the ALA. This week, the American Historical Association highlights the collection and selects some of their favorites:
- Government Comics Collection of UNL, By Elisabeth Grant, AHA Today (March 30, 2010).
NASA is archiving its social media posts
NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), is archiving its tweets, YouTube videos, photos on Flickr, and Facebook discussions using Archive-it.
- Archiving NASA (Mar 5th, 2010) by NASA Images. Have you ever wondered what will happen to all of NASA’s tweets, YouTube videos, photos on Flickr, or Facebook discussions? How will you find them years after they’ve been posted? What about the massive amounts of content published on nasa.gov everyday? Will it be accessible 50 years from now? NASA Images has teamed up with Archive-It (also a service of The Internet Archive) to ensure that all of NASA’s online activity will be preserved for future research, curiosity, and enjoyment. We have started by archiving 54 of NASA’s Twitter streams. These 54 streams will be updated once a month, archiving every tweet from every stream. The next step is to archive nasa.gov, including all subdomains, and all of NASA’s social networking activity (YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Ustream, MySpace). Take a look at the beginning of our conservation efforts in the NASA Images Social Networking collection on Archive-it.
- COLLECTION: NASA Social Networking. Archive-it. 2009 - present (Videos Archived: 13,054 videos).
- Archiving NASA’s social media. by Phil Plait Discovery Magazine Blog (March 21st, 2010).
Leaked CIA document and the war on Wikileaks
Glenn Greenwald has just published a subtle article about a leaked CIA document and the increasingly aggressive war being waged on Wikileaks, the site that anonymously publishes leaked sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, and religious documents. The first part of the article deals with the leaked document, entitled "CIA Red Cell Special Memorandum; Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission. Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough. (PDF)" (and also uploaded to the Internet Archive for the IAdeposit project). This hubristic document announces "Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters" and describes PR strategies for shoring up public support for the continued war in Afghanistan. But the more interesting and disturbing part of Greenwald's story concerns Wikileaks. Greenwald interviewed Julian Assange, the Australian citizen who is WikiLeaks' Editor. The interview shed light on Wikileaks' work in exposing the secret activities of governments and corporations and also how the US and other governments are targeting Wikileaks as an enemy of the state and trying to destroy the organization -- for more see last week's NY Times article "Pentagon Sees a Threat From Online Muckrakers" and Wikileaks own editorial on the subject.
...In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret report -- obtained and posted by WikiLeaks -- devoted to this website and detailing, in a section entitled "Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?", ways it would seek to destroy the organization. It discusses the possibility that, for some governments, not merely contributing to WikiLeaks, but "even accessing the website itself is a crime," and outlines its proposal for WikiLeaks' destruction. Greenwald also points out the proposed law in Iceland which would provide meaningful whistle blower protection to groups like Wikileaks. As the Pentagon report put it: "the governments of China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam and Zimbabwe" have all sought to block access to or otherwise impede the operations of WikiLeaks, and the U.S. Government now joins that illustrious list of transparency-loving countries in targeting them. ...The need for independent leaks and whistle-blowing exposures is particularly acute now because, at exactly the same time that investigative journalism has collapsed, public and private efforts to manipulate public opinion have proliferated. This is exemplified by the type of public opinion management campaign detailed by the above-referenced CIA Report, the Pentagon's TV propaganda program exposed in 2008, and the ways in which private interests covertly pay and control supposedly "independent political commentators" to participate in our public debates and shape public opinion.I highly recommend reading Greenwald's article. It's eye-opening on so many levels. The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters. Glenn Greenwald. Salon.com. March 27, 2010. [HT @JeremyScahill!] Continue reading
“Less Access to Less Information” now available in its entirety!
From 1981 until 1998, Anne Heanue and the fine folks at the Washington Office of the American Library Association (ALA) published an amazing series called Less Access to Less Information by and about the U.S. Government, a chronology of efforts to restrict and privatize government information. Readers may remember that the Internet Archive was kind enough to digitize the series from 1981 to 1996 for FGI, but that I had not been able to get my hands on 1997-98 issues. Well now, thanks to Bernadine Abbott Hoduski who sent me the 1997-98 volumes, the complete chronology from 1981 - 98 is now digitized and hosted at the Internet Archive. Please check out the entire series of Less Access to Less Information by and about the U.S. Government available in the FGI library. Many thanks again to Ginger Bisharat and Robert Miller at the Internet Archive for their effort. Also thanks to Bernadine Abbott Hoduski for sending me her copies of the series and Emily Sheketoff, Associate Executive Director of ALA and manager of the Washington Office who graciously gave me permission to digitize the series. Continue reading
IG: State Dept Should Produce 12 FRUS Volumes Per Year
Secrecy News says there is a new report on the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series.
- IG: State Dept Should Produce 12 FRUS Volumes Per Year. by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (March 25th, 2010).
- Report of Inspection: The Bureau of Public Affairs, U.S. Department of State Office of Inspector General, February 2010, at pp. 34-38. “The [State Department Historian's Office] is behind schedule in meeting the statutory FRUS deadline: HO historians only now are compiling the contents of the volumes covering the foreign policy of the Carter administration (1977-1981),” the Inspector General report said. “To achieve compliance with the 30-year deadline, HO will need to accelerate the rate of publication to approximately 12 volumes per year.”