New WMD Report Card Released
Yesterday, the Partnership for a Secure America released a new WMD Report Card. The report gives our defenses against a WMD terrorist attack as a grade "C," a slight upgrade from the 9/11 Public Discourse Project's 2005 grade of "D." Former 9/11 Commissioners Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-IN) and Sen. Slade Gorton (R-WA) were present at the press conference. In related news...
- President Bush spoke this morning at the dedication of the Pentagon Memorial.
- The Flight 93 Memorial is underway; NPR has a story about visiting the site.
- And the memorial at the World Trade Center site is still under construction; Mayor Bloomberg demanded yesterday that it be completed by 2011. Continue reading
More Problems with the “Foreign Relations of US” Series
FRUS Volume on Eastern Europe, 1973-1976, Elicits Dismay, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, Sept. 10, 2008.
While every FRUS publication is of interest, the latest E-volume reinforced concerns about diminishing quality control in the venerable series. “I was taken aback by how skimpy it is,” said Mark Kramer, director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies. In principle, the major advantage of a softcopy-only volume is that it permits publication of a greatly expanded collection of records, unlimited by the production constraints of a hardcopy volume. But that advantage has gone unrealized in the new FRUS volume.Continue reading
BEA Digital Library Expands
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Digital Library
The BEA digital library of seminal documents related to the history of the U.S. national economic accounts. The library includes key Survey of Current Business articles from the 1930s through the 1990s, early reports by the Department of Commerce on the measurement of national income and product, volumes from the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, Annual Review articles through 1974, and selected other documents.... The Digital Library has recently undergone a major expansion. It was first launched in June 2006, and now includes 1,141 articles from the Survey of Current Business, spanning from 1934 to 1992. The latest update, brought online May 14, 2008, introduces 111 new articles from the 1980s, adding some of the most recent content to the Digital Library yet available. ...The Digital Library now contains a total of 1,158 documents, including those that were not originally published in the Survey of Current Business.See also: more about the Digital Library Expansion. Continue reading
EPA upgrades to Web 2.0
EPA upgrades to Web 2.0, By Kathleen Hickey, GCN, 09/09/08.
The Environmental Protection Agency launched a redesigned Web site today that features Web 2.0 tools. EPA officials said they made the new site more interactive and task-oriented to fulfill the needs of the public and federal, state and local agencies. The new site features a blog, social bookmarking tools, Really Simple Syndication feeds, videos and podcasts about EPA activities. The site also includes links to information about protecting the environment and improving energy efficiency, recycling and pollution prevention.Continue reading
We Want YOU… To Help With the Dot Gov Harvest!
Hi to all you FGI readers! I'm thrilled to be this month's guest blogger. As we all watch this historic presidential election unfold, there's another question going on in the back of our minds--how much of this online government information is going to change with the new administration, regardless of who's sworn in next January? As someone who works specifically with digital government collections, and whose primary job is capturing defunct government websites, this is of particular interest. Most of you already know about the "Dot Gov Crawl" project that's been organized to address this issue. The project partners include the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, the California Digital Library (CDL), the University of North Texas (UNT), and the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO). We're working collaboratively to harvest and preserve government websites (primarily .gov and .mil domains), to form a snapshot of digital government information at the end of the current presidential administration. The Internet Archive will be performing the comprehensive crawl, and Library of Congress is focusing on congressional materials. CDL and UNT will be performing in-depth harvests of specific government websites, gathering documents linked deep within the websites that may not be gathered in the Internet Archive crawl. I encourage you to participate in the project. Communicate with the partner institution closest to you, and let them know if there are specific websites (or portions of websites) that are of particular interest to you. At UNT, we're trying to focus on documents that support our regional interests, things that might be overlooked in the kinds of sweeping national topics that will be handled by the Internet Archive. We're requesting that librarians for the central United States send us things that you want captured--websites you use often, publications deep within websites that might not be captured in large crawls, topics of regional interest. Your requests will help us identify and prioritize the information that is preserved for future generations. Please, submit any suggestions you have in the comments section below--I'll be monitoring them and adding them to our list. Thanks for your input! Continue reading