OpenSecrets.org Goes OpenData
How cool is this? Today the Center for Responsive Politics has announced that it's putting 200 million data records from its archive directly into the hands of citizens, activists, journalists and anyone else interested in following the money in U.S. politics. The data are available through the site's Action Center. Thanks OpenSecrets!
The following data sets, along with a user guide, resource tables and other documentation, are now available in CSV format (comma-separated values, for easy importing) through OpenSecrets.org's Action Center at http://www.opensecrets.org/action/data.php: CAMPAIGN FINANCE: 195 million records dating to the 1989-1990 election cycle, tracking campaign fundraising and spending by candidates for federal office, as well as political parties and political action committees. CRP's researchers add value to Federal Election Commission data by cleaning up and categorizing contribution records. This allows for easier totaling by industry and company or organization, to measure special-interest influence. LOBBYING: 3.5 million records on federal lobbyists, their clients, their fees and the issues they reported working on, dating to 1998. Industry codes have been applied to this data, as well. PERSONAL FINANCES: Reports from members of Congress and the executive branch that detail their personal assets, liabilities and transactions in 2004 through 2007. The reports covering 2008 will become available to the public in June, and the data will be available for download once CRP has keyed those reports. 527 ORGANIZATIONS: Electronically filed financial records beginning in the 2004 election cycle for the shadowy issue-advocacy groups known as 527s, which can raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, labor unions and individuals. To download bulk data from OpenSecrets.org, users must register on the site and agree to prominently credit the Center for Responsive Politics, along with other terms of service. CRP is making its data available through a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license, which allows users to remix, tweak, build upon and share the Center's work non-commercially. CRP will continue to offer its data to commercial users for a negotiable fee. OpenSecrets.org also offers a number of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to give users direct access via web programming to data displayed on OpenSecrets.org. Web developers are already using these APIs to display OpenSecrets data on their web pages and create mashups using live, up-to-date data. Users can also share CRP data using OpenSecrets.org's widgets, which can be placed easily on any website or blog. New widgets for the 2010 election cycle are in development.Continue reading
Guide of the Week: Los Angeles
The ALA GODORT Handout Exchange has librarian-produced guides using resources from every level of government, from international to local. Today's guide is a case in point:
Official Links for Los Angeles City and Los Angeles County (Mary Finley, California State University-Northridge, 2008)This guide is broken up into six sections:
- Official Links: City of Los Angeles - Los Angeles County
- Directories and Guides: Services & Help - Business Assistance - Transportation - Education & Culture
- L. A. City/County Statistics & Facts: Economic/Demographic - Crime - Environment - Education - Health - Other - Budgets
- Election Issues & Results
- Politicians: Who represents you? - Contact the politicians - Lobbyists and Campaign Contributions
- Local Codes and Regulations
- American FactFinder (Census Bureau)
- Airport Passenger Boarding and All-Cargo Data (Federal Aviation Administration) - Reports include data on several Los Angeles area airports.
- California Department of Finance - Site includes demographic as well as financial and economic data.
- Residential Vacancy Data (City of Los Angeles Housing Dept.)
- Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services Statistics - Statistical reports, caseload characteristics, and various research reports about social assistance programs and welfare reform from the Research, Evaluation and Quality Assurance Division of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services.
National Academies Reports (1863 to 1997) Now Available in Open Access
The National Academies (The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council) have a long history of advising the government. Now, they have announced "the completion of the first phase of a partnership with Google to digitize the library's collection of reports from 1863 to 1997, making them available – free, searchable, and in full text – through Google Book Search. The Academies plan to have their entire collection of nearly 11,000 reports digitized by 2011."
- More Than 9,000 National Academies Reports Now Available in Open Access, press release, April 10, 2009.
Lunchtime listen: Free Culture Conference @ Berkeley
This is actually about a month of lunchtime listens / views! Last fall, there was a Free Culture Conference held at UC Berkeley. Now the entire slate of panelists can be seen on blip.tv. Speakers included a who's who of internet law and free culture activists -- Laurence Lessig, Pam Samuelson (who just wrote a paper on excessive copyright infringement awards!), our buddy Josh Trauberer of GovTrack.us, EFF's Jason Schultz and many more!
FDA 1906-1963 Documents Digitized
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced the availability of the FDA Notices of Judgment Collection, 1906-1963.
The FDA Notices of Judgment Collection is a digital archive of the published notices judgment for products seized under authority of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. The NJs are resources in themselves but also lead users to the over 2,000 linear foot collection of evidence files used to prosecute each case. The evidence files are a rich documentary resource filled with legal correspondence, lab reports and data, photographs, and product labeling and containers. This digital library, created using the SPER system, allows for browsing the collection as well as searching the collection's metadata and full-text. Currently only the Drugs and Devices portion of the collection is available in the digital library. As we complete work on other portions those will be released on an ongoing basis. Users are welcome to visit NLM to use the hard copies at any time.The collection uses DSpace and provides technical information about the project: System For Preservation of Electronic Resources (SPER). Continue reading