Pentagon Pulls Nuke Document; Mirrors Available
The Memory Hole blog has this story with links: Pentagon Pulls Nuke Document; Mirrors Available, September 22, 2005, The MemoryBlog.
An unclassified draft of a US nuclear doctrine review that spells out conditions under which US commanders might seek approval to use nuclear weapons has been removed from a Pentagon website, a spokesman said Monday. Lawrence DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman, said the document was taken down "because even in an unclassified world this is not the kind of thing you want flying around the Internet."Continue reading
Privatization of Environmental Health Perspectives proposed
NIEHS is considering privatizing the journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) (http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS1466 -- http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/allpubs.html). It is a monthly open-access journal published by the NIEHS and is read in nearly every country of the world. It covers environmental news, environmental medicine, and children's environmental health. It is available on the web and made available to Pubmed Central, Medscape, and JSTOR. Its highly successful monthly Student Edition "sponsors development of teacher lesson plans based on environmental news articles." It is ranked second of 132 environmental sciences journals and fifth of 90 public, environmental, and occupational health journals.
The announcement says that, NIEHS has not reached a final decision about potential privatization of EHP. Nor has an implementation plan for carrying out such a decision been developed. Implementation, if executed, would address several core issues, which are listed below with questions for which public input is sought in developing agency strategy. It poses several questions including: How should EHP's current open access policy and commitments to provide content to public archives be addressed in a potential privatization? and Overall, how would a privatization of EHP be an advantage or disadvantage to the NIEHS and to environmental health science?
Continue readingFOI disclosures via RSS
Here's news from the UK that may be of interest here as well. Martin Stabe at UK Freedom of Information Act Blog reports that the UK Department of Education and Skills as well as the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital NHS Trust now are using RSS to distribute freedom of information act disclosures. If US agencies were doing that, we librarians could collect those feeds and create a robust collection of FOIA information for our users! Continue reading
Justice department database kept offline
Timely, Effective and Fair? Justice Department makes a valuable public database all but inaccessible By Bob Williams, Center for Public Integrity, September 13, 2005.
It is a detailed database that could be shining a constant light on the shadowy and complicated world of Washington lobbyists working for foreign governments and overseas companies, a potentially invaluable tool for promoting government transparency, honesty and accountability. Instead, the Foreign Agent Registration Act database housed at the Justice Department— which is a public record by law—is a shadowy, complicated beast. And that seems to be just fine with the government officials in charge of it.Continue reading
Comments on DLC Vision Draft
September 23, 2005 / Leave a comment
We think Daniel Cornwall's recent comments regarding the DLC Vision statement were thoughtful and thorough. We'd like to add a few additions and stress some of his more important points. We thank the DLC for opening the discussion on the future of the FDLP and offer this constructive criticism in the hope that the DLC will find some information of use to the final draft. We feel that there are strong reasons for having an FDLP into the future. Click here for the printer-friendly version of this post We believe that the draft could be greatly improved by changing its tone in Part I from a negative focus ("no longer exclusive...," "superseded FDLs," "curtain call for FDLP") to a positive vision of the role of libraries in the future. The tone of the current draft seems to imply that FDLP libraries need to recapture what was once a captive audience. Rather than focusing only on "access" (and thereby ignoring and diminishing the importance for libraries to select, acquire, organize, and preserve information for a constituency), Part I could describe both the effects and opportunities of digital information distribution including the provision of new and better services. We believe that the vision statement would be improved if it, instead, took a more positive and innovative approach to the future, rather than looking to the past. Continue reading →
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