Public Access Mandate Made Law
Public Access Mandate Made Law, The Alliance for Taxpayer Access. December 26, 2007.
President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.Continue reading
Reopening EPA Libraries in Budget
CONGRESS DIRECTS EPA TO RE-OPEN ITS LIBRARIES. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). December 21, 2007
Buried within the omnibus appropriations bill Congress sent this week to President Bush is a Christmas present for the beleaguered library network of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Congress ordered EPA to restore library services across the country and earmarked $3 million for that purpose...
The rationale for the library closures was never clearly spelled out by the agency, which maintained that it wanted to digitize all of its holdings. Its original claim of cost savings did not bear up under scrutiny and clashed with the enormous expense of digitizing hundreds of thousands of documents. In addition, the agency did not anticipated copyright restrictions, which barred many of its holdings from being digitized.
See more coverage of EPA libraries here.
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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.
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