Army Blocks Public Access to Digital Library
Army Blocks Public Access to Digital Library by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, Feb. 13, 2008.
Public access to the Reimer Digital Library, which is the largest online collection of U.S. Army doctrinal publications, has been blocked by the Army, which last week moved the collection behind a password-protected firewall.
But today the Federation of American Scientists filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking the Army to provide a copy of the entire unclassified Library so that it could be posted on the FAS web site.
The Army move on February 6 marks the latest step in an ongoing withdrawal of government records from the public domain....
The move came as a surprise since only unclassified and non-sensitive records had ever been made available at the Library site.
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Public Library Features Army Captain’s Blog
Cheryl Napsha, the director of the William P. Faust Public Library in Westland Michigan, persuaded an Army Captain who is stationed in Baghdad to write a blog about his experiences and features it on the library's Web site, westland.lib.mi.us. Captain Adrian Massey, who is from Michigan, posts to the blog about twice a week. Massey is the author of a book of poems titled "A Soldier's Poetic Response: A Slice of his Life." The blog itself is at poetadrianmassey.blogspot.com/.
- Library shows another side of war in Iraq, By Cecil Angel, Detroit Free Press, February 13, 2008.
Political RSS feeds
Will Johnson notes in a post to the OpenHouse Project mailing list that RSS feeds from Members of Congress are almost impossible to find and, "I'm pretty sure that some of the offices aren't aware that their CMS [Content Management System] is generating a feed." To help out he has set up an interesting remix/mashup called PolFeeds, which grabs those feeds as well as those from candidates. He describes it this way:
PolFeeds. n. A website that brings you virtually all of the RSS feeds offered by Presidential Candidates, Members of Congress, and the White House together in one place.
In his post he describes a bit about how flexible this is:
If you want info from a particular politician, you can just go to "name.polfeeds.com". For example, barackobama.polfeeds.com will give you the content for all of Obama's feeds, Twitters, YouTube videos, blog posts, Flickr photos, everything. Of course, you can limit your view to particular types of items. If you want to see only blog posts by House members, you can go to polfeeds.com/house/blog.
Appending "/rss" onto the end of any url will give you the rss feed for the items on that page. You can also subscribe to the feeds individually or create a custom feed. For example, you could put together videos from Pelosi with blog posts from McCain and press releases from Boehner.
Very cool!
Continue readingFastcase Public Library of Law Opens its Doors
The Fastcase Public Library of Law was launched yesterday as "the most comprehensive free resource for legal research online." PLoL claims that it is the largest free law library in the world. A cursory examination shows an easy to use interface with links to caselaw, statutes, and regulations. You can look at federal law or choose your state from a dropdown menu. We'll all have to spend some time trying it out to see if it's a resource we can enthusiastically recommend.
There are also links to content you have to pay for - legal forms, for example, is one of the main tabs but you have to buy the forms after viewing them. I'm not crazy about that - But most of the links are free. Fastcase is a commercial legal research company that specializes in caselaw databases. Offering free, well-organized legal information is probably a smart business decision too if it builds the name and reputation of your company.
Administration shuts down “best-of-web” economicindicators.gov
Forbes has awarded EconomicIndicators.gov one of its “Best of the Web” awards. As Forbes explains, the government site provides an invaluable service to the public for accessing U.S. economic data:
This site is maintained by the Economics and Statistics Administration and combines data collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, like GDP and net imports and exports, and the Census Bureau, like retail sales and durable goods shipments. The site simply links to the relevant department’s Web site. This might not seem like a big deal, but doing it yourself -- say, trying to find retail sales data on the Census Bureau’s site -- is such an exercise in futility that it will convince you why this portal is necessary.Yet the Bush administration has decided to shut down this site because of “budgetary constraints,” effective March 1.
Here's a cross-section of the data available: Advance Monthly Sales for Retail and Food Services | Advance Report on Durable Goods | Construction Put in Place | Corporate Profits | Current Account Balance (International Transactions) | Gross Domestic Product | Housing Vacancies and Homeownership | Manufacturer's Shipments, Inventories, and Orders | Manufacturing and Trade: Inventories and Orders | Manufacturing and Trade: Inventories and Sales | Monthly Wholesale Trade | New Residential Construction | New Residential Sales | Personal Income and Outlays | Quarterly Financial Report | Quarterly Services | Retail E-Commerce Sales | U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services | U.S. International Transactions | *sigh* [Thanks ThinkProgress.org] Continue reading(From economicindicators.gov) Due to budgetary constraints, the Economic Indicators service will be discontinued effective March 1, 2008. Economic Indicators.gov is brought to you by the Economics and Statistics Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce. Our mission is to provide timely access to the daily releases of key economic indicators from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau.
