Those Pesky Gov Docs
Unlike emails related to the Plame case, the Bush Administration did not "fail to preserve" incriminating email records that impugn claims that it did not learn of levee failures in New Orleans until the following day. According to today's headliner in the New York Times:
This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.Continue reading
MIT & Alternet Challenge the Conventional Dumbdom
Through a series of reports by the best foreign policy thinkers at MIT's Center for International Studies and in collaboration with the progressive news publisher Alternet as a distribution channel, entrenched tenets of US foreign policy are being systematically scrutinized. Consider the following from Ben Friedman, PhD student in MIT's Political Science Department and a member of the Security Studies Program, from his report The Real Cost of Homeland Security:
Despite this threat inflation, spending on homeland security remains tiny compared with defense spending. The homeland security budget for fiscal year (FY) 2006 is $49.9 billion, including the Department of Homeland Security ($42 billion), up from $32 billion in FY 2001. States only spend about $1-2 billion a year on homeland security in addition to federal outlays. Private corporations spend, at most,another $10 billion. In total then, the U.S. spends about $60 [billion] annually on homeland security. The defense budget for FY 2006, without the costs of the wars, is $440 billion, an increase of $135 billion over FY 2001. The extra spending goes to weapons and personnel that have little to do with terrorism. Widespread fear of terrorism has primarily benefited the budgets of part of the national security landscape that has the least to do with it.Check out other foreign policy papers from MIT that have appeared on Alternet. For a more extenisive listing, go to the source itself -- the Center for International Studies at MIT. Continue reading
(SC) Foreign Relations of the United States
The Government Documents Department located in Dacus Library, Winthrop University has a variety of patrons - both students and the general public. One day a Veteran came in searching for documents regarding his service to our country. He wanted to see the documents that lead up to his involvement and to see if he and his fellow military friends’ names were included. Until he found the documents pertaining to his involvement he had no idea what the conflict was about. We found most of this information in the Foreign Relations of the United States. I was pleased to help him and quite happy to know I had found exactly what he wanted. Patricia A. Stafford Library Technical Assistant Dacus Library, Winthrop University South Carolina Continue reading
LIS Webcast: Government Information at the Crossroads
LIS Webcast: government information at the crossroads (February 7, 2006) Charley Seavey talks with Laurie Canepa of the State Library of New Mexico and Barbara Rehkopb of Washington University in St. Louis about the present and future of government information. This Webcast, hosted by the University of Missouri, Columbia's School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, is a nice service and opportunity to share information and ideas. I highly recommend listening to the interview. First off, congratulations to Laurie and the State Library of New Mexico for being honored as Depository of the Year and to Barbara and WASHU for celebrating their 100th anniversary as a federal depository library! There are a few things I'd like to highlight about Charley's interview with Laurie and Barbara. I was interested to learn about the New Mexico News Plus service, a blog and clipping service highlighting federal government information mentioned in the news of local and regional import -- see there ARE uses for blogs in libraries ;-) . I was also excited to hear that Laurie is feeding those digital documents (many of them fugitives) into their state library's OCLC-supported digital archive. All three agreed that this is of vital importance to the preservation of digital government information because they were skeptical of GPO's ability to preserve all documents for all time. I'd also like to mention a meme that worried me. All three agreed that, since many public libraries have internet access, they can and should consider themselves depository libraries. I think this rings true on the surface, but when looked at more deeply, denegrates the work that depository librarians have done for the last 150+ years. Access is important, yes, but collections, cataloging, reference and long-term preservation are the pillars on which depositories are built. Putting a "link to American Factfinder" on a library Web page does not a depository make. This statement and belief only makes it more difficult for docs librarians to convince their administrations of the continuing vital importance of documents and efforts to build local digital collections. And I'll end my missive with this quote from Dr. Seavy for you all to mull over:
[35:30] GPO needs to recast itself as an information access agency right now the legislation isn't going to let them do that. They need congressional action and the resources to do it. If every state is doing what Laurie is doing ... downloading and preserving on local servers stuff that is relevant to that state/region, then in a way we've got alot of redundancy there we've got alot of, a big safety net. I fear that if we put it all in one federal basket somewhere, then some day some fool is going to decide well we don't need this stuff anymore; the money ran out or whatever and boom all that history goes away. I'd really rather see alot more local responsibility in taking care of and preserving the digital information that's out there. I think GPO and Superintendent of Documents has got a role, but I'm a long way from convinced that everybody should depend on the feds to do it. I just don't think it's going to happen.(hmmm, seems I've heard this idea before somewhere ;-) ) Continue reading
Net Neutrality Not An Optional Feature of Internet
Net Neutrality Not An Optional Feature of Internet The Senate Commerce Committee, co-chaired by Senators Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), is currently holding hearings on Net Neutrality (video and transcripts) with a long list of heavy hitters scheduled to appear on both sides of this important issue. Daniel Berninger, a senior writer at Business 2.0 Magazine has a great editorial that succinctly and passionately describes just why net neutrality is absolutely essential for the internet and why the telcos are being extremely shortsighted and will end up destroying the very infrastructure they helped to set up. And this isn't some tree-falls-in-the-woods type of discussion. It has direct, dire, and long-reaching consequences on libraries and internet users. Without net neutrality, free access to digital govt information (not to mention the entire internet!) will be a thing of the past. Consider:
The telco and cable companies have in mind creating another type of customer not a class of service. They want suppliers to pay for the right of transit. It amounts to airlines charging Time Warner for the right of readers to take Time magazine on an airplane. It means charging Ford tolls in addition to drivers for the right of Ford cars to use highways.and:
Beware of the monopolist that wants the “market†to decide. If there actually existed a healthy market for Internet access, users would certainly switch away from service providers tinkering with performance based on kickbacks from content companies. The toll collecting ambitions of the telco’s and cable co’s hinge on the absence of market forces. The fights against municipal wireless initiatives and lobbying budgets that exceed R&D budgets arise to defeat any leakage of market power. Network neutrality forces a virtuous cycle where winning requires making offers faster and cheaper. This dynamic accounts for growth in the info tech industry as platform improvements expand the range of possible applications.Continue reading