Secret Agreement Reveals Covert Program to Hide Reclassification from Public
This is truly mind-boggling. According to the National Security Archive, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the agency charged with assuring public access to government records, "secretly agreed to a covert effort, led by the Air Force, the CIA, and other still-hidden intelligence entities, to remove open-shelf archival records and reclassify them while disguising the results so that researchers would not complain." FGI originally reported on this story here and here. Scott Shanes at the New York Times, who's been following this story, wrote a piece yesterday entitled "Why the Secrecy? Only the Bureaucrats Know" (registration may be required). There's also more background, as well as copies of the CIA and USAF mou's, at Secrecy News.
"Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret. Secrecy is a source of power, nothing is so fanatically defended." --Max Weber "Economy and Society." 1914Continue reading
Maine Seeks to Opt Out of GATS Library Agreement
Maine Seeks to Opt Out of GATS Library Agreement According to a recent post on American Libraries, the state of Maine has petitioned the Bush administration to have the state excluded from the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) Library Agreement that is currently being negotiated in Geneva, Switzerland. Maine Governor John Baldacci wrote, “Libraries are important sites of free and democratic exchange of information. For this reason few developed countries have committed libraries to the terms of the GATS. By committing libraries to the GATS and not specifically exempting public funding from GATS rules, we compromise the support that taxpayers give to ensure that public libraries continue to serve as valuable democratic spaces. Please carve Maine out of the libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural services sector.†Public Citizen notes that "the U.S. has never specified that public funds for libraries are limited to public institutions only and, 'since aspects of these services are provided in competition with other service providers,'they may be subject to claims of unfair competition by the commercial sector." What exactly does that mean? Well, libraries could be sued for offering videotapes and dvds, and even ostensibly for loaning materials since all of those services could be viewed as unfair competition. SPOCK! .... must .... get...utility belt.....SPOCK!!! Continue reading
The Catalog of U.S. Government Publications and the state of the OPAC
Some serious questions about the role of libraries and the functionality -- or lack of functionality -- of library online public access catalogs (OPACs) are in the news lately. These questions fit in well with the recent release of the new Government Printing Office online Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP). The announcement (Enhanced version of the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP)/OPAC now available by John S. Dowgiallo, 9 Mar 2006) and subsequent discussion on the govdoc-l mailing list (see various entries in March and April 2006) focused largely on the acceptable functionality of an OPAC rather than the needs and expectations of users in the age of Google and other Internet search engines. A broader range of discussion of the place and functionality of OPACs can be found in the following recent articles:
- How OPACs Suck, Part 1: Relevance Rank (Or the Lack of It), by Karen G. Schneider, 03/13/2006, ALA TechSource.
- How OPACs Suck, Part 2: The Checklist of Shame by Karen G. Schneider, 04/03/2006. ALA TechSource.
- The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools. Prepared for the Library of Congress by Karen Calhoun.
- A Critical Review [of the above report] (PDF) by Thomas Mann. April 3, 2006, Prepared for AFSCME 2910 The Library of Congress Professional Guild
- The Future of the Catalog, [comments on the above report and review] April 10, 2006, Catalogablog.
Censorship at the Department of Education?
Censorship at the Department of Education? by Scott Walter, April 13th, 2006. Association of College and Research Libraries, ACRLog. Walter reports "the possibility that the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences may have been involved in an attempt to squelch the publication of essays critical of one its recent innovations, the What Works Clearinghouse. Continue reading
Statistics Canada e-pubs free as of April 24, 2006
As of April 24, 2006, all electronic publications available on the Statistics Canada website will become free of charge.
(from the StatCan press release) The New Publishing Model has two components: * the free dissemination of all electronic publications on our website * priced publications released on paper. The adoption of the New Publishing Model supports the longstanding principles underlying the Agency's dissemination program: to make information of broad public interest widely available to the Canadian public but to charge individual clients for special products and services where the benefits do not accrue to the public at large and where additional costs are incurred by the Agency in providing them.This notice was kindly forwarded to us here at FGI, and also posted on the Access to Government Information Interest Group (AGIIG) and Dlilist: Discussion forum for Data Liberation Initiative issues, both Canadian documents listservs. Continue reading