Criticism of FBI records retention and destruction
It isn't often you see a discussion FOIA, FBI, NARA, and Records Retention Plan and Disposition Schedules in the popular press. This article describes the frustrations of one researcher when he discovered that records had been destroyed by the FBI.
- The Department of Forgetting: How an obscure FBI rule is ensuring the destruction of irreplaceable historical records, By Alex Heard, Slate, June 24, 2008.
The system's fundamentals make sense, I guess--very complicated sense--but to me the disturbing part comes at the end of the line. At some point 25 years after a case closes, a file that isn't marked "permanent" gets pulled and looked at by one or two people inside the FBI. There are no "knowledgeable representatives of the NARA" monitoring this crucial moment. If it's decided internally that the file isn't important, it's gone. Michael Ravnitzky, an FOIA researcher based in the Washington, D.C., area, is no fan of the Records Retention Plan and likens it to an open-ended manual for strip-mining a priceless public record. "The FBI got a list of exceptional files given to them by historians, and they said, 'We'll keep that,' " he says. "We'll keep large files. Smaller files, we'll keep a sampling. Everything else gets tossed. That's what the plan is." Based on documents Ivan Greenberg obtained from the FBI, he estimates that 250 million pages were destroyed between 1986 and 1995.Continue reading
New Army study of its campaign in Iraq
- The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003-January 2005 : on point II : transition to the new campaign by Donald P. Wright, Timothy R. Reese ; with the Contemporary Operations Study Team. June 2008 (720 pages, PDF, 104Mb). Also available in paper copy from GPO.
On Point II is the US Army's first historical study of its campaign in Iraq in the decisive eighteen months following the overthrow of the Baathist regime in April 2003. The book examines both the high-level decisions that shaped military operations after May 2003 as well as the effects of those decisions on units and Soldiers who became responsible for conducting those operations. The authors, historians at the US Army's Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, based this account on hundreds of interviews with key participants and thousands of primary documents. Critical chapters in this book address the decision to disband the Iraqi Army, detainee operations (including the incidents at the Abu Ghraib prison), reconstruction efforts, and the Army's response to the growing insurgency. At the core of On Point II is the dramatic story of how after May 2003, the US Army reinvented itself by transforming into an organization capable of conducting a broad array of diverse and complex "Full Spectrum" operations. This was the new campaign that confronted American Soldiers beginning in May 2003 as they strived to create stability in Iraq.See also: Occupation Plan for Iraq Faulted in Army History, by Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, June 29, 2008. Continue reading
Preview of NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has put online a preview of its famous Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF).
From the Preface:Abramowitz and Stegun's Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables is being completely rewritten with regard to the needs of today. The new DLMF (Digital Library of Mathematical Functions) will appear in a hardcover edition and as a free electronic publication on the World Wide Web. The authors will review the relevant published literature and produce approximately twice the number of formulas that were contained in the original Handboook. The DLMF will make full use of advanced communications and computational resources to present downloadable math data, manipulable graphs, tables of numerical values, and math-aware search. The authoritative status of the existing Handbook, and its orientation toward applications in science, statistics, engineering and computation, will be preserved. Thus the utilitarian value of the Handbook will be extended far beyond its original scope and the traditional limitations of printed media. The term digital library has gained acceptance for this kind of information resource, and our choice of project title reflects our hope that the NIST DLMF will be a vehicle for revolutionizing the way applicable mathematics in general is practiced and delivered.See also NIST Releases Preview Of Much-anticipated Online Mathematics Reference, ScienceDaily (June 27, 2008). Continue reading
The saga of the GAO legislative histories continues
A few weeks ago, we posted a story about GAO selling exclusive access to GAO legislative histories to Thomson West (see "GAO *did* sell exclusive access to legislative history to Thomson West" and GAO subject for all GAO stories). This was a rich historical chunk of GAO information (20,597 legislative histories of most public laws from 1915-1995!!) and it was set to be locked up with T/W claiming exclusive rights and licensing access. Well, not so fast. Carl Malamud, tireless hero of the public domain, got wind of the deal, and got the GAO to release 10 DVDs of legislative histories, containing 619,481 PDF files -- the pilot project scans they conducted. He has proposed a joint venture with the Internet Archive to scan the same materials with the same terms as Thomson West, give GAO one full copy of all their data AND put up the data online (presumably the Internet Archive) clearly marked as public domain material available for reuse without restriction. And what's more, Carl says, "If they say yes, we intend to ask Congress to earmark funds to pay the Internet Archive to scan this invaluable resource." !! You can follow the paper trail on Carl's Federal Legislative History site. Below is the letter of unsolicited joint venture sent to GAO. Way to go Carl!!
Continue readingCopyright Renewal Records
[cross posted on LegalResearchPlus] From Inside Google Book Search
"How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S. Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online (see http://www.copyright.gov/records) but not downloadable in bulk. The Copyright Office hasn't digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly corrected the OCR." "Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we've gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here." [Hat tip to BoingBoing for this news!]Continue reading