Spring 2008 DLC Conference March 31 – April 2 Resources Page
Official materials including handouts and some prepared speeches can be found at http://www.fdlp.gov/repository/dlc/spring08/index.html. Please feel free to send us your notes or recordings of conference sessions. Continue reading
Government-Funded Database Blocks Users from Searching for Abortion Articles
This story is going around on the medical/life sciences library listservs today. Apparently, the POPLINE database has made the word “abortion” (and possibly other related terms) into search stopwords like AND or THE which cannot be searched. The term is still listed as a keyword, but entering it in the search box as a subject or keyword gets zero result. According to an email exchange forwarded around on these listservs, this appears to be a purely political decision, not based on that being a non-useful search term in the database. The POPLINE database, funded by USAID and hosted at Johns Hopkins U is a free database on population issues.
- Why is a Government-Funded Reproductive Health Database Blocking Users from Searching for Abortion Articles?, by Rachel Walden, MLIS (Nashville, TN), Women’s Health News, April 2, 2008
[E]ntering "abortion" as a search term in the POPLINE database now returns zero results because of a move by the database personnel to block that search. For background, POPLINE is "the world's largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues." The librarian who noted the problem inquired about it, and was informed that it wasn't a simple technical glitch; the response she received was, "We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now."I found a document, Abortion-seeking behaviour among Nigerian women, that includes the keyword ABORTION and clicked on the link to that term at the bottom of the citation and got other hits, but, as noted above, using the search function did not return these articles. Continue reading
CRS Reports: update on legislation
Here is an update on Senator Lieberman's Congressional Research Service bill, S.Res. 401. and a comment on it: Senator pushes alternative to full CRS report access, By Dan Friedman, Government Executive, March 28, 2008. The story says:
After consultations among committee aides, CRS and others, a prototype will be rolled out "very soon," according to a CRS spokeswoman and Gantman. The plan aims to balance public needs and the views of "a significant number of members" who oppose Lieberman's bill due to their belief some CRS reports should remain confidential, Gantman said. But this approach would disappoint government transparency advocates who say all taxpayer-funded reports should be publicly available. "They should simply move on the Lieberman proposal or something like it and get on with their job," said Stephen Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.CRS Access Update, Speech or Debate Clause, by John Wonderlich, The Open House Project, April 3rd, 2008 John notes that reports of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Government Accountability Office (GAO) are published and searchable on the agencies’ Web sites and are syndicated in RSS and this hasn’t harmed their effectiveness or perceived objectivity at all. Continue reading
EDGAR’s new companion, EMMA
Everyone knows about the SEC's EDGAR database. Now, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, a self-regulatory organization established by Congress to develop rules for broker-dealers and banks that underwrite, trade and sell municipal securities, has launched a pilot project, EMMA (Electronic Municipal Market Access). EMMA is an Internet-based disclosure portal that provides free public access to disclosure documents and real-time municipal securities trade price data for the municipal securities market. The EMMA website is now accessible at emma.msrb.org Dirt Diggers Digest alerted us to this story:
For more than a decade, key corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission have been available to the public at no charge through the EDGAR website. This has been a boon for transparency and a godsend for researchers. During the same period, those who wanted to access analogous documents on tax-exempt bonds filed with the lesser known Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) have had to use commercial services such as Munistatements and DPC Data that charge hefty subscription or pay-per-view fees. Now that is beginning to change. This week MSRB introduced EMMA (short for Electronic Municipal Market Access), which is described as “an Internet-based disclosure portal.” The key document EMMA will disclose is the Official Statement (OS), a prospectus that issuing agencies publish with details on new municipal securities.Continue reading