What the candidates are saying about FOI
The Sunshine Week website created a page entitled: "What the Candidates Are Saying About Open Government and FOI" based on the the Sunshine Week survey responses and analysis of articles, speeches, and debate transcripts that give insight into the candidates' thoughts on government access to information. They state: "Only New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards responded, and only Richardson answered all the questions. The remaining four leading major party candidates were re-surveyed following Super Tuesday in February. To date, none has replied". They mention Obama's Senate co-sponsorship of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which went into effect on New Years Day '08 with the launch of USAspending.gov, a site that "gives people access to information on government contracts, grants and other awards". Speaking of which, USAspending.gov is based on the software that runs Fedspending.org. I'm going to examine both these sites and see how the differ, but so far, the only difference I'm seeing is that USAspending.gov has a lengthy privacy policy which dotgovwatch.com claims is different from their previous warning! Continue reading
Public Dissatisfied with Government Financial Transparency
The Association of Government Accountants published a report entitled "Public Attitudes Toward Government Accountability and Transparency 2008", based on their first annual survey of public attitudes toward government financial information transparency and accountability. It is a part of AGI's "Advancing Government Accountability" campaign, which they hope will educate the government and the public on the benefits of government transparency, particularly in reporting government financial information. Not a big surprise here...the survey findings show that people are deeply dissatisfied with the availability of government financial information and how it is delivered to the public: "...among those who do receive information about governments’ generation and spending of money, there is a strong dissatisfaction with the information that they receive. The strongest dissatisfaction is with the information about the federal government’s financial management (Federal, 60%; State, 46%; Local, 38%). Only 5% are satisfied with what they receive from the federal government". To view more of the survey's findings, view or download the PowerPoint file. Librarians can learn from this...know where to retrieve government financial information and make this known to your patrons and your community! Continue reading
Ken Burns on PBS
As you are probably aware, President Bush has proposed reducing public broadcasting funding by 56%. The New York Times asked in a recent article (Is PBS Still Necessary?, By Charles Mcgrath, New York Times, February 17, 2008) and there is now a debate about the value of Public Broadcasting in the age of cable and the Web (see for example: "Is PBS Necessary?" The Debate Moves Online, PBS Engage Blog). We have even had a few comments on this here on FGI (Is PBS passé?, by Susanna Leers, and comments).
Now Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker whose projects include "The War," "The Civil War," "Jazz" and "Baseball" (about which he says, "none of the films I have made in the last nearly 30 years could have been produced anywhere but at PBS") weighs in with an Op-Ed:
- Standing up for public television, By Ken Burns Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2008. "PBS offers an invaluable service that none of the other channels can deliver."
New UN statistical database
A posting in Slashdot has information about the new UN data access system called UNdata that contains information from all major UN databases and those of several other international organizations. UNdata will improve the dissemination of statistics by UN's Statistics Division (UNSD) to the widest possible audience. It is an easy to use data access system that was developed to meet UNSD’s vision of providing an integrated information resource with current, relevant and reliable statistics free of charge to the global community. The design allows a user to access a large number of UN databases either by browsing the data series or through a keyword search. Continue reading
LCSH heading change from “govt publications” to “govt “information”
My pal, Jenna Freedman, the Lower East Side Librarian started subscribing to the Library of Congress Subject Heading Weekly list (probably out of love for Libraries' great good friend and cataloger extraordinaire Sandy Berman!). This week she came across a strange one that I hope our readers can expound on in the comments, especially since I'm not a cataloger.
150 Electronic government information [May Subd Geog]Is this LC's documentation of a move away from government publications as the instantiation of our government's work toward e-government and government information as transaction? Should we be worried about this change in the heading? Is this just semantics? Is there a cataloger in the house? The other one that I found strange was:
* 450 UF Electronic government publications [EARLIER FORM OF HEADING]
* 550 BT Government publications
(C) 150 Global cooling [Not Subd Geog]Is that some sort of Newspeak?!?! Continue reading
450 UF Cooling, Global
550 BT Global temperature changes