Sen. Leahy urges online publication of Founding Fathers’ papers
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is calling for the papers of the Founding Fathers Project to be made available to all Americans through the Internet according to a story in a Vermont newspaper. The Project has been collecting and annotating the papers for 50 years. The project has been criticized for moving too slowly and for costing more than an estimated $60 million in federal and private funding. Leahy's Committee heard testimony from Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough whose access to the papers of John Adams contributed to research for his award-winning biography.
Leahy is quoted in a press release as saying "I support the prompt digitization of all of the Founding Fathers’ Papers, so that this information can be made available to all Americans via the Internet. If Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and Franklin could pipe into this discussion today, we all know that they would ask, “What are you waiting for?” Harnessing the exquisite power of the Internet to preserve and proliferate the Founders’ papers is a marriage made in Heaven. "
“I see a collaborative project!”
I'm going to reprint James' comment from Wednesday on the Michigan digitization project here because I think it merits some serious discussion. There were a series of comments on the way the government documents have been cataloged in the Michigan catalog because the variance in cataloging has caused a lot of the documents to be barred from public viewing "due to copyright":
I see a collaborative project! it'd be great to be proactive on UMich's govt pubs. Rather than having to submit a form when an item is found that should be accessible/in the public domain, wouldn't it be cool if UMich put up a list of all their documents (in a wiki?) and let the community/public have at it to verify "public domainness" of documents. Documents classes could assign reviewing as well. There is precedent for this kind of collaborative project. In 2006, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war (which was later shut down because detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research were available publicly! oops!!). A site called LibriVox has volunteers who read chapters of public domain books, many of which have been digitized by Project Gutenberg.The point is, let's leverage the power of the internet to help get govt information out to the public!As it happens, right after I read James' comment I was in a meeting where I found out about another project occurring at the law school library at Rutgers University. The project, Congressional Documents Online, is a full-text archive of Congressional Hearings and Committee Prints from the Rutgers law library collection. The Law Library is in the process of digitizing its print collection of Congressional documents and the website says that there are "7064 documents available, totalling: 1581950 pages, 238814558897 total bytes, as of: Wed Dec 19 14:47:37 EST 2007". All are freely available online. There's a simple search box and a browseable list of the documents. Continue reading
The Real ID Act threatens religious minorities
CNET news has an interesting article about how the Real ID Act, a federal law that takes effect on May 11, will cause problems for Americans who object to facial photograph requirements on religious grounds. The lengthy new regulations released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as a result of Real ID set minimum standards for state-issued driver's licenses and IDs, among which is a "full facial digital photograph" that adheres to specific federal requirements. Religious groups including some Amish, Old Order Mennonites, Muslims, members of Native American faiths, and fundamentalist Christians object to identification cards bearing their photographs. The article includes an interactive map of the US that lets you check how your state's ID complies with the federal law.
Continue readingOnline Child Protection and Free Speech Legislation
The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) has released a report from a joint project they conducted with the Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF). The project tracks more than 30 pieces of federal legislation that seek to protect children online, some of which pose serious threats to free speech. The reports summarize and categorize child online safety bills introduced in the 110th Congress, analyze free speech implications of key bills, and provide recommendations to Congress on how it can promote child online safety without impinging on First Amendment rights. Here's the Bill Tracking Report [38 page PDF] which is nicely organized - it has the legislation indexed by popular name, topic, Senate Bill and House Bill numbers, and federal agency/department. For each bill you can see the text in html or pdf and then concise information about the bill as well as the analysis by both the CDT & PFF. You can also download the CDT Analysis [PDF] and the PFF Analysis [PDF] of the legislation. In their summary the CDT states that " Many of the child protection proposals now pending in Congress... would not be effective child protection measures and would raise very serious policy and constitutional problems."
Continue readingSearchability at the Smithsonian website
The January 7 issue of Federal Computer Week had an article by Ari Schwartz (deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology) that summarized the findings of the "Hiding in Plain Sight" report that was blogged about here on FGI in December. In the article Mr. Schwartz mentions that they found that the Smithsonian Institution (among other agencies) website resources had information obscured "including many online content collections in the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System". The Smithsonian has responded in a letter to the editor of Federal of Computer Week: "All of the databases in the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) are site-mapped according to the international standard ... SIRIS has 1,679,277 records available via the sitemaps to crawlers such as Googlebot. According to Google, 1,567,170 records from SIRIS, or 93 percent, are included in the Google index. We started working on the sitemaps in February 2007 and worked directly with Google engineers in June to enhance the accessibility and ranking of our records. We understand that the public expects to find all Smithsonian information in one system, but as stated on our home page, SIRIS contains only information from the Smithsonian’s libraries, archives and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s research databases. The museum collections information is available through other systems described on the Smithsonian’s home page. However, efforts are under way to make one-stop searching available to the public in the future. We continue to work hard to raise the visibility of our data to the public through multiple channels, including search engines." Thanks for the clarification, Smithsonian and we're glad to hear you are responsive to the public. Continue reading