Cindi Wolff: BOTM for May
FGI's blogger of the month is Cindi Wolff (see her bio for more background). Cindi's interests are in open access and govt information. We're loooking forward to seeing what she has to say! And also, thanks to Shane Mackey for his posts as BOTM for April! Continue reading
Cindi Wolff’s bio
Cindi Wolff, our guest blogger for May, 2006, is currently serving as the head, serials services at the university of oklahoma health sciences, The Robert M. Bird Health Sciences Library in oklahoma city, OK. The Bird Library is a selective housing site for the OU Norman campus which Cindi "officially" set in 1990 when she served as the government documents librarian on that campus from 1988-1993 -- when she started her new position in January, 2006, she discovered the 1990 selective housing agreeement signed by the two library directors that she had typed up! Prior to her return to oklahoma, she served as federal documents librarian [u.s. and canada!] at the university of california at berkeley, Project Manager [i.e., library director], the U.S. Department of Labor , Regional Librarian at Lousiana State University, Director of Collections at US Department of the Interior Library, and Acting Head of the Government and Geographic Information and Data Services at Northwestern University. Despite her various titles, she always served as the government information specialist at the institutions she has the pleasure of working. As she likes to point out to classes, "if you elminate pornography, I estimate that 70% of the information that you find on the Internet is government information: created by the government, from the government, or repackaged by commercial and educational entities. And every librarian is a government information librarian because you can no longer just send the user to the basement when they ask a question." Her guest blog will deal with issues concerning open access with the working title: "Open Access: It's Not Just PubMed". Continue reading
Bill to mandate online access to federally funded research
A new Senate bill introduced by John Cornyn (R, Texas), would require that taxpayers receive free online access to journal articles containing federally funded research within six months of the articles’ publication. Agencies would have to preserve the manuscripts in a stable, digital repository that provides free public access, interoperability and long-term preservation.
NARA’s declassification audit
*This is an update to the original story posted on FGI.* On April 26, U.S. Archivist Allen Weinstein and Information Oversight Office Director J. William Leonard released the results of their audit into the secret reclassification of 55,000+ previously declassified pages of public records (there are various numbers floating around out there and it's unclear whether the archivist is counting *pages* of records, or complete records). Archive General Counsel Meredith Fuchs reacted by stating,
"We are stunned to learn that this program is even larger than we were previously told. For the last two months we thought only 9,500 records were reclassified. In fact more than twice that number were reclassified, and we now know that re-reviews happened at Presidential libraries as well as at NARA and that between 24 and 36 percent of those should not have been reclassified." Commenting on the specific findings, Fuchs noted, "This report confirms our fears that some Executive Branch agencies are willing to pour taxpayer dollars into efforts to control all information for all time without considering whether it is necessary or even feasible. Not only did this surreptitious reclassification program draw attention to information that otherwise would likely have remained obscure, but it did so at tremendous cost. I can't imagine that we are any safer today than we would be if this reclassification program had never taken place."Read more from the National Security Archive Continue reading
Is USGS Seamless website down?
Is USGS Seamless website down? The USGS Seamless website (Seamless Data Distribution System, Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS)), which has provided high-resolution satellite imagery of several dozen US cities without restriction and which has always been publicly accessible, now has a message on the homepage that says "The system is currently experiencing an interruption of service. All Seamless servers and services will be unavailable until further notice." Links are still active on the home page, though, and some still work and link to other servers. It is unclear what is online and what is not available. Cryptome (29 April 2006) wonders if we are about to lose access...
Seamless began to go insane about a week ago, at times freezing, or delivering a variety of messages, and at one point requiring a password for access. Here's hoping Seamless has not been targeted for public closing by the secrecy-obsessed.Continue reading