“Foreign Relations of the U.S.” series falls further behind schedule
State Dept Series Falls Farther Behind Schedule, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (December 22nd, 2009).
The U.S. State Department’s official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series had another disappointing year in 2009 with only two softcopy volumes published to date, including one released last week on "Global Issues, 1973-1976." ...a third FRUS volume on "Foreign Economic Policy, 1973-1976" [should] appear before the end of the year, and at least one other in January 2010.... There are four Vietnam volumes alone that should be published in 2010.Continue reading
White House praises Princeton Federal Register application
White House boosts social media apps, by Doug Beizer, FCW.com (Dec 15, 2009).
An application produced at Princeton University that makes it easy to search the Federal Register is an example of the applications White House officials want to see created, McLaughlin [the deputy federal chief technology officer] said. The application, named FedThread, also lets users to sign up to receive alerts about items published in the Federal Register based on keywords. ..."We can make a lot of government data available, but it doesn't really do much good unless apps developers translate it into Web sites, mobile applications or platform apps that really are useful."Continue reading
Holiday gift idea: a piece of the public domain
Carl Malamud's FedFlix project is a joint venture with the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) whereby he takes NTIS videos, digitizes them and uploads them to the Internet Archive. Well now he's expanding FedFlix to include public domain videos from the National Archives. He's released 41 videos into the public domain in this way, but has put together an Amazon Wish List in order to expand public access to public domain video content from the National Archives. If you see anything you'd like to buy the public domain, they'll take your DVD and upload the video to YouTube, the Internet Archive, and to public.resource.org's own rsync/ftp public domain stock footage library. So why not add a gift of the public domain to your favorite person's/people's stockings this year? We'll all be glad we did! UPDATE 12/25/09: The wish list has been fulfilled. You can watch all of the donated NARA videos on YouTube, Internet Archive, or public.resource.org's bulk server. Thanks Carl! [HT BoingBoing!] Continue reading
WSJ Tracks the Nation’s Bank Failures
The Wall Street Journal has a very nice visualization tool Tracking the Nation's Bank Failures. I wish they cited their sources and said something about their methodology and made the data they used available. For some odd reason, that is just not part of what newspapers regularly do yet. Continue reading
FOIA
Gabriela Schneider, the Communications Director of the Sunlight Foundation, writes:
David Brisson marked the completion of his fall internship at Sunlight today by posting a recap of his independent research project. Since it digs into FOIA, I thought you all would appreciate it: http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2009/12/18/can-the-internet-save-foia/Continue reading