Update on White House E-Mails
During the period between March 2003 and October 2005, at least 5 million e-mails may have been sent but not preserved.
- White House Backups are Incomplete, May Not Contain Some Missing E-mails, National Security Archive, May 6, 2008.
The White House yesterday admitted to a federal magistrate judge that it has no computer back-up tapes with data written before May 23, 2003, and that it cannot track the history of individual hard drives within the White House system that may contain missing e-mails.Continue reading
Election fact checking
The sheer volume of election coverage can be daunting to follow for even the most hard-core election junkie, let alone the casual observer. A few sites do everyone the favor of breaking campaign reports and statements down to the facts, attempting to separate the truth from the truthiness. FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. It is essentially a multimedia blog that responds to the factual assertions and allusions made in politics at the federal, state, and local levels. FactCheck.org's staff elegantly analyzes candidates' statements on such issues as a potential gas price fix for factual consistency. They dutifully list their reference sources and, for contextual emphasis, they frequently provide audio and video links to the candidates' actual comments. PolitiFact, mentioned previously on FreeGovInfo, is a service of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly Inc. PolitiFact's trademark is its Truth-O-Meter, which measures political statements on a scale of "True" to "Pants on fire." It's handy for those who want bottom-line analysis straight away. Like FactCheck.org, PolitiFact does have full articles with which it provides sources and multimedia links, although the analysis is not quite as deep. But PolitiFact does a better job of organizing and integrating its content: you can browse statements by Truth-O-Meter rating, by subject, by the person who said it, by whom it was said against, and even by where it was said (TV ad, blog post, speech, etc.). Other interesting fact-checking sites include: The Center for Public Integrity - A "nonprofit, nonpartisan, non-advocacy, independent journalism organization" that uses investigative journalism to examine political and campaign issues in depth. Of particular note is the Buying of the President site which looks at how money influences the presidential campaigns. Opensecrets.org - Tracks money in politics and distills it into graphs, charts, and brief summaries. It is run by the non-partisan, non-profit Center for Responsive Politics. The Fact Checker - A Washington Post blog that analyzes campaign statements in a similar way to FactCheck.org and PolitiFact. The difference here is that topics are prompted by user suggestions. It employs a "Pinocchio Test" similar to PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter. -Brian Continue reading
FOIA drop-box
A tweet from John Wonderlich (from the fabulously cool Open House Project!) yesterday got me thinking. He posted about submitting his first Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. I'm not sure what the request entails, but my thought was that it'd be cool if there was somewhere on the net that folks who got documents via a FOIA request could submit copies of both the request and the documents. Now maybe there already is, although I don't think the Memory Hole does this (hey Russ Kick, is MH defunct? I don't see any new content since Oct 2006!). My library is already gobbling up and preserving the FOIA reading rooms, but I don't have any sense about how many FOIA request documents make it into those agency sites. Does anyone have an answer to that? So, if you've got any FOIA documents laying around your hard drive, send them over to FGI at admin AT freegovinfo DOT info. We'll post them on this site and on the Internet Archive's US Government Documents collection. We'll make sure they get on the 'net and get preserved for long-term access! Continue reading
GODORT preconferences still open to registration
ALA annual conference is coming up and there are a couple of GODORT preconferences that may be of interest to FGI readers. Since they're on different days, you could attend both! Want to learn more about Web2.0 technologies and documents librarianship? There's still time to register for the GODORT pre-conference "Docs2.0: emerging web technologies for the government documents community" at ALA Annual conference in Anaheim, Friday, June 27, 2008, 9:00am – 12:30. The 1/2 day preconference will be chock full of both hands-on work and discussion about Web2.0 tools and how they can be used to help documents librarians with their collections and services. FGI volunteers Jim Jacobs and James Jacobs will be presenting about RSS and del.icio.us; Additional speakers on the slate are Amy West, David Oldenkamp, and the keynote will be John Wonderlich, Program Director of the Sunlight Foundation. The other preconference of interest is entitled, "Got Elections? Informing the Public" on Thursday, June 26, 8:30am - 4:30pm. This is cosponsored by GODORT, ACRL, and LPSS. At this lively full-day workshop with nationally recognized speakers, attendees will learn Who Decides? (Information on Voters), Who Runs? (Information on Candidates), Who Cares? (Information on Issues), and Who Wins? (Information on Election Results). Help library and online users make sense of the information they find. Transportation will be provided from the Convention Center. Location: California State University Fullerton, Pollak Library, 800 N State College Blvd. Speakers: Rhodes Cook, Political Analyst, RhodesCook. com; Stephen Woods, Social Sciences Librarianm Pennsylvania State University; Chris Palazzolo, Librarian for Political Science & International Documents, Emory University; John Hernandez, Politics and U.S. Documents Librarian, Princeton University; Erik Estep, North Carolina Reference Librarian, East Carolina University; Jerry Wong, Information Services Specialist, U.S. Census Bureau Tickets: Advance: GODORT Member: $125; ALA Member: $150; Non-Member: $200; Student/ Retired Member: $100. Onsite: GODORT Member: $140; ALA Member: $165; Non-Member: $215; Student/Retired Member: $115 Event Code: GO1 Continue reading
Happy RSS day!
Wow, today is a convergence day of holidays! Not only do we have May Day, [w:International Workers' Day], and [w:Loyalty Day], but now there's also RSS Day! [w:RSS] (aka "rich site summary") is the little XML file that could; that is, RSS can help librarians and readers in general collect and read the stuff in which they're interested. See the video below for a really good, straighforward description of RSS. And don't forget to register for the GODORT preconference at ALA Annual '08 entitled, Docs2.0: emerging web technologies for the government documents community. FGI will be there with Jim Jacobs presenting about RSS and James Jacobs moderating and presenting about del.icio.us.