US govt classifies record number of documents!
Increase in the Number of Documents Classified by the Government NY Times, July 3, 2005 by Scott Shane. According to the Information Security Oversight Office (part of NARA), a record number of government documents were classified last year. Add to this the 2001 Ashcroft FOIA memorandum that gave federal agencies more leeway in administering FOIA and limiting access to information, and you get a recipe for a *drastic reduction* in the amount of government information accessible by citizens and researchers. For some background, the National Security Archive has an interesting report entitled, "THE ASHCROFT MEMO: "Drastic" Change or "More Thunder Than Lightning"?" There's also an interesting article on government secrecy entitled, "The Age of Missing Information: The Bush administration's campaign against openness." By Steven Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy. Continue reading
(HI) Business and cultural history of Warner Brothers 1925-1950
I am writing a business and cultural history of Warner Bros with emphasis on the period 1925-1950 when the Warner brothers owned and managed the company. An important element in the Warner Bros. story is the role federal antitrust suits played in the company's evolution. Many of the Senate and House hearings investigating FTC and Justice Department allegations about restraint of trade by the Hollywood oligopoly were available to me on microfiche at the University of Hawaii. Gwen Sinclair, head of the UH documents division, introduced me to the CIS files and instructed me how to use Lexis-Nexis to locate the documents relavant to my study. -- non-affiliated writer, researcher, user Continue reading
(HI) Doing the hula in Alaska or searching for chemical weapons
The place to go is your local Government Documents collection. Luckily, when I was asked to find out why a river in Alaska is named the Hulah ula River, I already knew about the great resources in the University of Hawaii at Manoa's Government Documents collection. I looked for publications on Alaska place names and hit several useful sources right away. I knew about because I'd previously searched there for documents about U.S. stocks of chemical weapons left in the Pacific on Guam Island at the end of World War II. I was part of a Hawaii team with a contract to help the Government of Guam determine what chemicals were still on the island, if any. The super helpful librarians at Gov Docs helped me find declassified reports, journal articles, histories of the war, congressional hearings, reports to the United Nations, post-war Governors, and much more. They also showed me several data bases I could access and how to work the printed index systems. As a bonus they helped me find resources in off Oahu libraries and more. Continue reading
FDLP Success Stories
Below are Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) success stories submitted to FGI. These stories are indicative of the importance of government information to library users and the continuing need for the FDLP in providing access to and preservation of government information. If you'd like to submit a government information success story, please go to the Success story form. Continue reading
Excellent XML! Rhode Island shows how to share government information!
The Secretary of State's office of the state of Rhode Island has set up a service called GovTracker which is the most advanced use of government-to-public technology I've seen. The government group responsible for this says that they have a goal of sharing information with the public:
It is the goal of the RI Data Share Committee to make Rhode Island a national showcase for the utilization of data sharing technologies in government that will offer citizens, businesses and state and local governments a more efficient and cost-effective way to share and exchange information via the InternetThe service provides numerous RSS feeds, including "Recently filed minutes," "upcoming open meetings," "Traffic Conditions - Providence," and so forth. There is a long list of those that are available and, of course, a "Feed of all Providence Feeds"! Continue reading