The mystery of the suspended U.S. government Twitter accounts
here’s a strange story unfolding. Our End of Term project friend Justin Littman from George Washington University, was doing some maintenance on the official US government twitter accounts that had been captured for the End of Term crawl, and noticed a number of .gov twitter accounts had been suspended. Account suspension happens when an account […]
GPO Director Davita Vance-Cooks Departs Federal Service
GPO Director Davita Vance-Cooks is leaving GPO for the private sector. Congratulations to Ms Vance-Cooks. The first African-American and first woman to lead the agency, she did so ably for 6 years. While this shouldn’t be a surprise — GPO directors (nee “public printers”) are political appointees named by Presidents after all — the timing […]
Digital Deposit And The Biennial Survey: context and actions
It is time for the biennial survey of FDLP libraries and, therefore, a good time to review “digital deposit.” Digital deposit is a very simple concept: It simply means that GPO should treat digital and non-digital government information the same way. In so doing, GPO would allow FDLP libraries to select digital government information and […]
Walks through a sunken dream: the CIA report on life on Mars
Document of the day — perhaps of the decade!! Thanks MuckRock! In 1984, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent a psychic back in time to talk to Martians. This is not code language. The CIA sent psychics back in time to talk to Martians because the CIA had time-traveling spacefaring psychics. Nothing else we could […]
Rev up your FOIA engines! Trump Admin’s first FBI Crime Report Missing 70% of data
This is definitely bad. Government data collection has always been political and driven by legislative requirements. The FBI has published uniform crime reports since 1930. but FiveThrirtyEight’s report about missing data in the 2016 FBI Crime Report is a new and troubling turn of events. The Trump administration is just ignoring long standing data collection […]