New FRUS volume shows that Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950
According to today's NY TImes, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 - 1972, sent a plan on July 7, 1950 to President Truman to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty, saying that mass arrests were necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.”
Hoover’s plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of cold-war documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The collection makes up a new volume of “The Foreign Relations of the United States,” a series that by law has been published continuously by the State Department since the Civil War.
Continue readingHappy solstice/holidays from FGI!
Greetings all and happy winter solstice or your favorite year-end holiday! It's been an exciting and busy year for us here at FGI. As you can see by the recent blog posts, things have been a little slow for us in the past week or so, but that's to be expected with all the travel/planning/family/cooking etc that goes on. We'll no doubt delve back in to the news in full-force in the new year. If any of our readers are interested in being our blogger of the month in January, please drop us a line at admin AT freegovinfo DOT info.
Peace and free and open government in 2008!
Continue readingDelivery by FTP and RSS coming in FDSys
The Government Printing Office released a new technical document on the Federal Digital System (FDSys) called FDsys System Release and Capabilities v5.0, December 2007.
In paging through this document, I was pleased to learn that when the latest release (1C) is deployed, FDSys will support delivery of documents in formats including PDF by FTP and RSS. The sections making note of these new features are brief:
4.10.5 Delivery by RSS
FDsys will allow users to sign up to receive DIPs via RSS.
4.10.8 Delivery by FTP
Release 1C.4 builds upon 1C.2 by allowing users to request delivery based on user defined criteria.
Depending on how these features are implemented, it could be exciting for federal documents stakeholders including depository libraries.
As previously announced, I believe, people will also be able to get notifications of new content without having to get full file downloads:
4.10.22 User Notifications
Release 1C.4 will build upon Release 1C.2 by providing additional email and RSS notifications. Users will be able to sign up to receive notifications for system events, business events, and job processing events. This includes receiving a notification when now content is added to a collection or when there is a match to a user defined string.
According to the release schedule, some of these features will appear by November 2008 and others won't be ready till 2009. But it looks like GPO is on the right track and bringing out features long sought by many in the documents community. We at FGI are cautiously optimistic.
Continue readingGovernment Information: The OMB Watch Magic Eight-Ball
Information Magic Eight-Ball, OMB Watch, 12/18/2007. "Over the past year, there has been a great deal of activity on issues related to government transparency and secrecy, but it can remain difficult to figure out exactly what all the discussions, reports and hearings actually mean. To try to get to the bottom of this murky issue, we are breaking out our Magic Eight-Ball of Information Policy to ask a few key questions about the past year — the progress and setbacks, laid out in simple terms. We wish there was a better approach, but unfortunately, 2007 was that kind of year for government transparency, with vague and unclear answers for most questions."
Continue reading50-State Agency Database Registry Launches Historical Materials
The 50-State Agency Databases Registry, which I coordinate, has launched a new set of subject-focused database collections under the heading of history:
* Biographical Databases - Databases that provide biographical sketches of authors, state officials, famous state residents, etc.
http://wikis.ala.org/godor
* Historical Media Databases - Databases that provide online access to photographs, video, or audio.
http://wikis.ala.org/godor
* Historical Newspaper and Magazine Indexes - Databases that index articles in older newspapers, journals and magazine that contain historical information. These databases will usually lead one to microfilmed items that may be obtainable through Interlibrary Loan.
http://wikis.ala.org/godor
* Museum Collection Databases - Catalogs of state museum holdings which often have historical notes. Museums listed here are either run by a state or by one of the state's political subdivisions
http://wikis.ala.org/godor
* Official Records Databases - vital records, (birth, death, etc), war pensions, etc.
http://wikis.ala.org/godor
These pages just launched, so they are a little light on content. The Registry volunteers will be adding to these pages in the next few weeks.
If you are registered with the ALA GODORT wiki and would like to help the effort along, please browse the state pages or search for words from the historical categories and copy and paste databases from the state pages to the appropriate subject page.
Why these topics? Because after making solicitations here, on govdoc-l and on Facebook, more people wanted subject pages for historical materials than anything else. It's my personal hope that when these annotated historical materials pages are filled out, they will be of special value to historians and to schoolchildren stuck with "I need to do a report on the State of _____." It will help them go beyond state symbols and the like.
Hope you enjoy them!
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