When is an agency not an agency?
There can hardly be a more basic government-documents question than one that asks you to identify a government agency. But recently, politics, secrecy, and corruption have made it difficult to determine even what should be obvious and unambiguous.
The most visible case of confusion, of course, is that offered by Vice President Dick Cheney in his resistance of routine oversight of his office’s handling of classified information: He says that he need not disclose information to the National Archives Information Security Oversight Office because he is not part of the executive branch. (Agency Is Target in Cheney Fight on Secrecy Data, by Scott Shane, New York Times, June 22, 2007)
But this is not the only instance of confusing categorization and re-categorization of agencies. Two more than were in the press recently:
- The Bush administration is arguing that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) because it is not an "agency" as defined under FOIA even though the White House Web site (as of August 22) listed the Office of Administration as one of six presidential entities subject to the open-records law. The Office of Administration responded to 65 FOIA requests last year and has its own FOIA officer. The Justice Department argues that past behavior is irrelevant. (White House Declares Office Off-Limits, by Dan Eggen, Washington Post, August 23, 2007; pA04)
- A U.S. District Judge overturned a jury award in a suit brought by a former whistleblowing FBI agent against a company accused of filing fake invoices in Iraq saying that the plaintifs failed to prove that the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-backed occupier of Iraq for 14 months, was part of the U.S. government. (Iraq Corruption Whistleblowers Face Penalties, The Associated Press, Aug 25, 2007)
FEC data available as a widget and API!
No, The FEC isn't doing this; MAPLight.org is. But, the FEC is providing the data in an an open format with detailed documentation which makes this all possible (see Files by Election Cycle at the FEC site).
MAPLight.org is providing access to Federal Elections Commission (FEC) data through an API (application programming interface) that makes it easy for any Web developer to build their own site or software program that displays or shares up-to-date campaign contributions from the FEC (www.maplight.org/widgets/apis) and through widgets (www.maplight.org/widgets) that allow anyone to track presidential fundraising on their own blogs, social media sites, and personal Web sites.
Both services, the widgets and the API, are free and open source, so anyone can use or modify them as they see fit.
Here is an example of a widget (but you can customize for your own site, of course!).
The MAPLight.org presidential widget is the first of several more widgets that the organization will release. By September 15, MAPLight.org will release a widget for U.S. Congress, showing total campaign contributions for each candidate for Congress. By September 30, MAPLight.org will release its "Money and Votes" widget, revealing correlations between campaign contributions and votes for any bill in U.S. Congress. To be notified when MAPLight.org releases these widgets, visit www.maplight.org/participate/signup. MAPLight.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in Berkeley, California. Its search engine at MAPLight.org illuminates the connection between money and politics (MAP) via an unprecedented database of campaign contributions and legislative outcomes.Continue reading
NARA public web priorities
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has published its "priorities and schedules for making National Archives information available and accessible on our public internet."
Thanks, and a tip of the hat to Patrice McDermott.
Continue readingUniversity Libraries Create Great Resource
One of things that libraries bring to the world of government information is the ability to take preexisting materials, make them user-friendly and offer them to the world at large for no charge. This is particularly true in the world of public domain federal government information, at least when it comes to digitizing.
A project I'd like to highlight today is a searchable version of the Foreign Relations of the United States done by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago Libraries.
For those not familar, here is a description of Foreign Relations of the United States from the State Department:
The Foreign Relations of the United States series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. The series, which is produced by the State Department's Office of the Historian, began in 1861 and now comprises more than 350 individual volumes. The volumes published over the last two decades increasingly contain declassified records from all the foreign affairs agencies.
Foreign Relations volumes contain documents from Presidential libraries, Departments of State and Defense, National Security Council, Central Intelligence Agency, Agency for International Development, and other foreign affairs agencies as well as the private papers of individuals involved in formulating U.S. foreign policy. In general, the editors choose documentation that illuminates policy formulation and major aspects and repercussions of its execution. Volumes published over the past few years have expanded the scope of the series in two important ways: first by including documents from a wider range of government agencies, particularly those involved with intelligence activity and covert actions, and second by including transcripts prepared from Presidential tape recordings.
In short, it's a good place to get declassifed materials and context for most US foreign policy decisions. The two University libraries and Federal Depository Library Program members digitized the paper volumes so that the text would be searchable, but researchers can see the actual pages of reproduced telegrams and the like.
I think this resource will be of great value to researchers. When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a senior paper on Turkey's accession to NATO. I wound up having to use FRUS a lot because that's where NATO meetings got recorded in the 1940s and 1950s, not as you'd expect in NATO publications. I remember checking out a dozen volumes at a time, stacking them on my apartment floor and carefully going through the index for "Turkey" and looking up pages and bookmarking them for later xeroxing. How I wished I had this product then. If made widely known, it could help people better understand historical foreign policy and contribute to today's policy debates.
A private company could have done this. But then it would be a subscription product and the average citizen or undergrad student couldn't be bothered with it. Now our declassified foreign policy heritage, both good and bad is out there for the whole world to see. And that's a good thing. Now if the CIA would stop trying to block new releases.
Is there some product at your library that you can add value to and show the world? Tell us!
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Fantastic Communism Govdoc Video!
Sarah Gewirtz of College of St. Benedicts/St. John's University has done it again! Watch here brillant video of federal documents issued to warn us of the horrors of communism back in the 1950s. The presentation is made more compelling by the fact it is set to a speech by Joe McCarthy.
Thanks Sarah! Her video joins the links list on our videos page. If you've made a video promoting government documents or depository libraries, send it to us and we'll add yours to our list.
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