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
Welcome Frank Lester, BOTM for April, 2008
On the blogger-of-the-month (BOTM) tap this month for your viewing/reading pleasure will be Frank Lester. Frank works at UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies Library -- read more about Frank on his FGI bio page. Boy, have we been on a run with our BOTM's or what? Huge thanks to Rebecca Blakeley, our BOTM for March, 2008. Rebecca posted a ton of interesting stories, commented on hers and others' posts and constantly beat me to the punch on tracking key stories. Below are just some of her posts over the month. Thanks again Rebecca. We hope you continue to feed us interesting stories in the future! Continue reading
Frank Lester, blogger of the month for April, 2008
Frank Lester is Electronic Services Librarian at the Institute of Governmental Studies Library at the University of California at Berkeley, a collection specializing in non-trade materials, ephemera, serials, and mongraphs relating to California and federal politics, public policy, and public administration. He is also the Institute of Governmental Studies webmaster and is on a rotating 2-year assignment as the webmaster of the Librarians Association of the University of California (LAUC), ending in the fall of 2008. Previous to IGS, he was an assistant government documents librarian at the University of Michigan, staff assistant at the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan, and a reference administrator at the Internet Public Library. Prior to his career as a librarian, Lester was a member of the campaign finance staff at the San Francisco Ethics Commission for three years. Lester has published in the Journal of Electronic Publishing and is the main contributor to the California Policy Inbox, a regularly updated blog highlighting recently-published California government agency and non-profit organization public policy documents and current California public policy news developments. Lester's main interests are national, state, and local politics, the role of developing technologies in increasing public access to and interest in government documents, and the intersection between the digital and the traditional library realms. Continue reading