Breaking news: Last week, the controversial site, Wikileaks -- which allows whistle-blowers to post corporate and government documents anonymously -- was shut down. But now, According to CNET News, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White has reversed his own order and turned the switch back on!

Yes, it's Leap Year day, or whatever it's called.  Those folks who were born on Feb. 29th get to have a real birthday party this year. 
You can read about leap year and other "timely" matters on the rather wonderful website of  the National Institute of Standards and Technology Time and Frequency Division, an operating unit of the Physics Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce that is  located in Boulder, Colorado at the NIST Boulder Laboratories.  While you're there you can check out their online exhibits about timekeeping and calendars through the ages, and you can also set your watch and be sure it's the right time!   

Congress worries that .gov monitoring will spy on Americans. News.com
February 28, 2008

A new Bush administration plan to capture and analyze traffic on all federal government networks in real time is generating privacy worries from congressional Democrats and Republicans alike.

At a hearing convened here Thursday by the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, politicians directed pointed questions to Department of Homeland Security officials about their plans to expand an existing "intrusion detection" system known as Einstein. Among other things, the system will monitor visits from Americans--and foreigners--visiting .gov Web sites.

And, a related article:

House Lawmakers Question Privacy in Cyber-Security Plan. By Brian Krebs, Washington Post, February 29, 2008.

House lawmakers yesterday raised concerns about the privacy implications of a Bush administration effort to secure federal computer networks from hackers and foreign adversaries, as new details emerged about the largely classified program.

The unclassified portions of the project, known as the "cyber initiative," focus on drastically reducing the number of connections between federal agency networks and the Internet, and more closely monitoring those networks for malicious activity. Slightly more than half of all agencies have deployed the Department of Homeland Security's program.
 

Thanks to FGI BOTM alum Carlos Diaz for notifying the govdoc-l list about a new resource from the National Agricultural Library (quote edited for URL formatting):

Looks like the NAL has begun to digitize in .tiff format their historical collection of publications including the Agriculture handbooks and yearbooks, etc.

You can find the Digital Repository at http://naldr.nal.usda.gov/

A very precious resource indeed.

We agree. The digital repository has publications going back many decades for the following series:

Agricultural Economic Report
Agriculture Handbook
Agriculture Information Bulletin
Bean Improvement Cooperative Annual Report
Bean Improvement Cooperative Natl Dry Bean Res Assoc Conference
Division Pomology Bulletin
Economic Research Service Staff Report
Fruit Vegetable Market News Report
Pomological Watercolors
Report Commissioner Agriculture
Report Secretary Agriculture
Rural Development Perspectives
Rural Development Research Report
Technical Bulletin United States Department Agriculture
World Poultry Congress
Yearbook United States Department Agriculture

Some monograph publications and other non-series publications are also available. The documents are a touch awkward to use though. You need to page through them one page at a time. But if you use their "print pdf" button, you can get a PDF file for your use. Another nice feature of this site is an RSS feed and list of recent additions.

Finally the repository can be searched. Results include not only matching publications, but also specific page numbers. Results can be sorted by the column headings, very nice!

Naturally I used "Alaska" for my search. It brought up hundreds of results, including this tidbit from the 1958 Agriculture Yearbook:

Creator        Johnson, Hugh A.    
Title     Seward's folly can be a great land.    
Source     Yearbook United States Department Agriculture    
Year     1958    
Volume_Info     1958    
Pages     p. 424-439.

Go and check out this resource. And then remember that it was a LIBRARIAN who brought it to you! Thanks again, Carlos!

The Government Printing Office released two videos demonstrating the "Proof of Concept" release of the Federal Digital System (FDSys):

Search - 3:22

Submission - 9:21

The videos require Windows Media Player to view and one of our volunteers was unable to view the videos using his Mac version of WMV. But I did get a look.

Everything below is subject to GPO's own caveat that this "proof of concept" version will change a lot between now and the first public release in late 2008.

I was impressed with the search functionality. The search box is simple with few options, but navigation boxes on the right hand side of the screen allow one to quickly zero in on likely documents. Search results may also be sorted by title, relevance, type of resource and date issued. Individual records have links to the content, preservation metadata and more.

The only problem I had with the search was the fact the search defaults to "OR". GPO itself now understands that is a problem based on beta user input and the video narrator promised this would be fixed in the public release. I have to admit that I don't understand how anyone in the age of Google would have made a default "OR" to begin with. But what's important is that the problem is being fixed.

The Submission section of FDSys will not be available to the public, but is interesting to watch the demo to see what is involved with document creation. Currently the ability to add metadata does not include keywords, which is something I hope will be included in the official release. Given GPO's move towards brief records under some circumstances, it would be very helpful to have agency generated keywords in FDSys.

There is some information in the agency submission side of FDSys that I hope carries over to either the public side or at least for FDLP librarians. FDSys requires an agency contact for every document. It would be helpful to librarians to a contact for documents in case something goes out of print or if a user had in-depth questions about the content of a given document.

Overall, this looks like a promising start. No mention of the alert features and push delivery slated for future releases, but hopefully those will be demoed soon.

"A document standards decision may not matter to you today, but as someone who relies on constant access to editable documents, spreadsheets and presentations, it may matter immensely in the near future." 

So says a post this week on the Official Google blog.

• A renewed wish for open document standards, by Zaheda Bhorat, Google Open Source Programs Manager, Official Google Blog, Feb 25, 2008.

There is a battle going on over open document formats that can affect the long term accessibility of government information. The battle is being waged by Microsoft, which wants its OOXML format to be adopted as an international standard instead of the truly open ODF format.

This week Google weighed in on the issue and summed up the complex issues quite succinctly, noting that:

Google believes OOXML would be an insufficient and unnecessary standard, designed purely around the needs of Microsoft Office.

...We join the ODF Alliance and many other experts in our belief that OOXML doesn't meet the criteria required for a globally-accepted standard.

Why? because OOXML attempts to make the functionality of Microsoft Office into the "standard." That would be bad because it elevates the importance of the software over the importance of the document.  Of course, the question about whether or not the government should release information in the form of "editable documents" at all is another question, but since it does, the issue of open formats for editiable documents is an important one for government information.

C-SPAN has recently released a great new online resource with lots of potential:  the  C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle (currently in beta) is an index to the C-SPAN video recordings of the House and Senate floor proceedings. According to C-SPAN the video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as it is available.  Each appearance has a video link where users can watch and listen to the actual remarks.  C-SPAN  hopes that this site will provide a useful tool for viewers and followers of Congress to research, watch, and review the actions of the Congress. They welcome  bloggers and websites to create links to various videorecordings and also welcome comments and suggestions for improving the service. 

Slate has an interesting article titled "Digg, Wikipedia and the Myth of Web 2.0 Democracy" in which the author, Chris Wilson, talks about how a few people are responsible for most of the entries in Digg and Wikipedia and various permutations of having an open-access site.  He makes that point that  "Despite the fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0, direct democracy isn't feasible at the scale on which these sites operate. Still, it's curious to note that these sites seem to have the hierarchical structure of the old-guard institutions they've sought to supplant."

This notice is being posted on behalf of Debbie L Rabina of the Pratt Institute. Questions about the item below should go to her:

-----------------

Journal of Information and Communications Technology Law
Submissions for a Special Issue: Government-held Information, Privacy and Civic Access

Governments are most frequently the largest collectors of data
within their jurisdictions, and often that data collection and storage
is financially supported with public taxes. How governments manage and make available that information when requests are made by non-government parties varies in each country. As the data-sharing world finds new and multi-platform ways to network, the variations of legal access to government-held information create both opportunities and difficulties. This special issue will collect the state of access to government-held information with special attention to concerns for civilian privacy and civic activists’ oversight of government operations. Submissions should conform to normal journal specifications noted http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/authors/cictauth.asp

Please send submission no later than August 1, 2008

Prof. D.L. Rabina Pratt Institute School of Information & Library Science, 144 West 14th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10011-7301 or by email drabina@pratt.edu

-------------------

Hopefully some FGI reader out there will come up with a good article as a result of this opportunity.

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is the main investigative committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. It has authority to investigate the subjects within the Committee’s legislative jurisdiction as well as “any matter” within the jurisdiction of the other standing House Committees.
Tues. Feb. 26 at 10 am the full Committee will hold a hearing entitled “Electronic Records Preservation at the White House.”  According to the Committee website,  the witnesses expected to testify include:

My Google Alert for podcasts works in strange ways. Today, for example, it sent me a podcast episode by Sen. Barack Obama done in 2006. Why it's flagging it now, I don't know.

But it's an interesting episode that addresses a major FGI interest, net neutrality. You can find the episode at http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060608-network_neutral/. I think he sums up the issues well:

"It is because the Internet is a neutral platform that I can put out this podcast and transmit it over the Internet without having to go through any corporate media middleman. I can say what I want without censorship or without having to pay a special charge.

But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the Internet as we know it. They say that they want to create high speed lanes on the Internet and strike exclusive contractual agreements with Internet content providers for access to those high speed lanes.

Everyone who cannot pony up the cash will be relegated to the slow lanes."

 If you're aware of other candidate statements on Net Neutrality, feel free to post links to them in comments. Interestingly, Sen. Obama's last podcast seems to have been on April 12, 2007. See all of his topics at http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/. If you're aware of him podcasting somewhere else, let us know by leaving a comment.

You and some friends or colleagues decide to start a blog together. This is pretty common, but might there be some legal issues you haven't considered? Over at InformIT, Eric Goldman has written a 2 part series that examines this possiblity.  Part I discusses the legal ramifications of blogging collaboratively,  and in part 2 the author points out some possible solutions and recommendations for mitigating unwanted consequences of co-blogging.

SCOTUSblog has announced the release of a new statpack (9 page pdf) that shows the breakdown of how each Supreme Court Justice has ruled at the quartermark of the term.  One new statistic includes how often each Justice votes with the majority, both overall and in divided cases.  The idea is that these figures reflect a general, if imperfect, measurement of how often each Justice is presumably pleased with the outcome of the Court’s decisions. Justice Antonin Scalia is the only member of the Court to vote with the majority in every merits decision issued so far this Term.

Thanks to my fellow blogger for the link to Fister's article.  I recently came across an article (linked through that splendid online publication brought to us by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Arts and Letters Daily) that offers more food for thought.  Titled Better than Free,this thoughtful piece by Kevin Kelly of Wired discusses how we might be able to add value to the vast amount of free information now available - value that people will be willing to pay for. He says that "The internet is a copy machine....When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can't be copied?" He discusses eight "generative values" that are better than free: 
immediacy,  personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability.  All of these are relevant to librarians as we adjust our skill sets to provide information available on the internet. 

This is a very useful and thoughtful piece that starts with musings on Facebook and privacy issues and addresses much larger issues that affect libraries and library users and academic publishing. This is a must read.

• Face Value, By Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed (Feb. 18, 2008).

Sample:

Libraries have always taken privacy seriously - not because it's valuable in itself, but because it's a necessary condition for the freedom to read whatever you want without risk of penalty. When the PATRIOT Act was passed, librarians checked to make sure their databases erased the connection between a book and its borrower as soon as the book was returned. That erasure, however, makes it harder to offer the kind of personalization, such as recommendations based on previous book choices, that the public increasingly expects from online systems. After all, it's what they get from Amazon.

...[W]e've barely begun to examine the unintended consequences of the Faustian bargain we strike when we share content through privately-owned digital domains of the public sphere.

Joe Esposito pointed to this article in a posting to the liblicense-l mailing list and he says:

As I was reading this, I reflected on an ongoing conversation with a friend of mine, a former Congressional staffer, about the growing political need for Google to be declared a regulated public utiility, like the AT&T of yesteryear. Too much power in the hands of too few: it's morally wrong, and socially dangerous.

I would just add to this that, when we rely on the government to be the only official repository of all government information, we are putting too much power in the hands of too few.  We are allowing the government to be the only entity that controls access to that information and the privacy or lack of privacy of all readers of that information. The solution to that is to build  collections of digital government information is libraries.  We have barely begun to understand the Faustian bargain we strike when we share content through a single government-controlled digital repository.

Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College. Her blog is barbara fister's place.

The Congressional Research Service has issued a report entitled (45 page pdf) Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2007, updated January 14, 2008 .  It reviews hundreds of instances in which the United States has sent military forces abroad in situations of military conflict or potential conflict to protect U.S. citizens or promote U.S. interests. The listed deployments vary in size and length, legal authorization and significance. In eleven separate cases listed in bold-face type the U.S. formally declared war against foreign nations; but for most the status of the action under domestic or international law hasn't been addressed.  A sample entry:

"1798-1800      Undeclared  Naval  War  with  France.    This  contest  included  land actions, such as that in the Dominican Republic, city of Puerto Plata, where marines captured a French privateer under the guns of the forts. Congress authorized military action through a series of statutes.
1801-05          Tripoli.   The   First   Barbary   War   included   the U.S.S. George Washington and Philadelphia affairs and the Eaton expedition, during which a few marines landed with United States Agent William Eaton to raise a force against Tripoli in an effort to free the crew of the Philadelphia.    Tripoli  declared  war  but  not  the  United  States, although Congress authorized U.S. military action by statute."

The H. Douglas Barclay Law Library at the Syracuse University College of Law has created a Race and Law Research Wiki that it hopes will be a valuable inter-disciplinary resource for researchers.  The topical organization is based on a Race and Law course syllabus and textbook.  For each topic, researchers will currently find bibliographies and research guides; web resources and databases; and legislative and administrative material.  The wiki also includes sections on statistics, how to find books and articles, and suggestions for relevant news sources and blogs.  Emphasis in all categories is on electronic resources; however, some references to print sources have also been included.  Anyone interested in contributing to the wiki can contact the librarian in charge here.

The Washington Affairs Office of the American Association of Law Libraries has just announced the launch of its new blog. The blog, named AALL’s Washington Blawg, will highlight bills that the AALL is tracking in Congress, Action Alerts, news, resources, events and more. The blog will will cover legislative, judicial and regulatory activities on the state, national, and international levels and address important topics such as access to government information, digital authentication, copyright, and open government issues. The WAO is located at the Georgetown University Law Library in Washington, D.C., a location that allows them to work closely with the three branches of government. They are involved in several active coalitions, including the Library Copyright Alliance, OpenTheGovernment.org, and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. You can keep receive regular updates by subscribing to the RSS feed, signing up for email updates, or by visiting the blog for the latest news.

Last week, we posted about the imminent demise of economicindicators.gov. Evidently, this news travelled quickly and DoC has decided to continue the site!! Below is the notice from the site:

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) has decided to continue the economicindicators.gov website. Featuring the economic releases from ESA’s Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the site was started by this Administration in 2002 to give greater awareness to these economic statistics. ESA initially planned to discontinue the service due to cost concerns but given the feedback ESA received, the decision has been made to continue the site and improve its functionality.

A popular feature of the site is the calendar that links directly to economic indicators on the Census and BEA websites. By continuing the Economic Indicators (EI) site, the fifteen major indicators released by those bureaus will still be listed, along with links to the full text of each release. EI’s information will continue to be provided free of charge.

Many users also subscribe to the site and have economic indicators and the full releases emailed to them. There are a number of technical challenges with this aspect of the EI site – the service often backs up and fails because of bandwidth issues, releases sometimes take hours to reach subscribers, and some subscribers receive multiple copies of the releases while others get none at all. The cost of maintaining the site is almost entirely attributable to operating this feature.

To address these concerns we will redesign the subscription feature of economicindicators.gov. The new system, which will remain free of charge, will email an abstract and link so that users can access the full release on the source website. We believe the cost of rewriting the system will, in the long-run, be less than continuing to run the existing system. The new subscription service will be operational in the next few months.

Existing subscribers of the economicindicators.gov service were offered a free trial subscription to the STAT-USA/Internet service (http://www.stat-usa.gov). A number of you have already signed up for that and we hope you will make full use of it.

Thank you for your responses to last week’s notice. We look forward to continuing to provide economic indicators, in the most efficient way possible.

Michael Sauers, who has the wonderful title of "Technology Innovation Librarian" and blogs for the Nebraska Library Commission, has started cataloging and offering Creative Commons-licensed works at his library.  What he did was to take electronic versions of CC titles, post them on his library's Web server, catalog them in the OPAC, and make them available to the public. Additionally, for titles whose license allows for physical printing of the works, they turned the electronic books into spiral-bound books to be added to the physical collection.  The result, so far, is that his library now has a collection of 9 CC-licensed electronic titles available through the OPAC along with 7 print versions available to circulate.   Also, seven of the nine titles resulted in brand new records in OCLC.  Corey Doctorow, one of the authors, has blogged about the project over at BoingBoing.

Army Says It Will Restore Public Access to Online Library. by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News. Feb 21, 2008.

The U.S. Army said today that it would restore public access to the online Reimer Digital Library of Army publications, after having blocked the site on February 6.The U.S. Army said today that it would restore public access to the online Reimer Digital Library of Army publications, after having blocked the site on February 6.

 

The Law Library of Congress has announced that they now offer RSS feeds and e-mail delivery of LLOC information.  Library feeds consist of a headline, brief summary, and a link that leads back to the Library's website for more information.  Available feeds cover Law Library News and Events, Law Library Webcasts, Legal Research Reports, and the Global Legal Monitor.  go to this page on their website to add the RSS feeds or to sign up for email notification.

"Omeka" is a newly launched website geared towards "cultural institutions, enthusiasts, and educators." Developed by The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University in partnership with the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS), Omeka's purpose is to provide a free online display platform that museums, historical societies, scholars, libraries, etc. can use for publishing collections and exhibitions online. Inside Higher Ed today reports that Omeka allows users to curate items professionally by offering easy creation of online collections.
Features that Omeka offers for online collections include:
- A Dublin Core metadata structure and standards-based design that is fully accessible and interoperable
- Professional-looking exhibit sites that showcase collections without hiring outside designers
- Theme-switching for changing the look and feel of an exhibit in a few clicks
- Plug-ins for geolocation, bi-lingual sites, and  other possibilities
- Web 2.0 Technologies, including tagging, blogging and syndicating.
The beta code for Omeka is being made available to the general public today. The  developers envision itas a relatively simple way to produce a rich, well-designed site that meets the common needs of librarians and archivists. 
The Omeka site has a showcase of several current projects.  One example of a site that has used an earlier version of  Omeka is the April 16 Archive, created by Virginia Tech after last year’s shooting attacks.  Another project is collecting the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

A prominently featured article in Sunday's New York Times dares to ask the question "Is PBS Still Necessary? "  Public broadcasting is once again threatened with budget cuts; the article's author, Charles McGrath, suggests that maybe public television isn't necessary in these days of hundreds of cable channels.  He distinguishes public television from public radio, which has a growing audience:  there are more than 30 million listeners now, compared to just 2 million in 1980.  In contrast, he points out, the average PBS prime time show has about as many viewers as "the wrestling show “'Friday Night Smackdown'”. 
I can't muster up much indignation at his article.  In my house I don't think we've watched the PBS station since the kids outgrew Sesame Street (though Sesame Street was on all the time when the kids were little)  a decade ago.  I tried to watch one of the Ken Burns programs but there were so many pledge breaks I gave up and just rented it from the video store.  Frankly, I find pledge breaks far more annoying than commercials. On the other hand, the only radio I listen to is the three public radio stations in Pittsburgh and I would be bereft without NPR. 
Is public television still an important cultural source for less urban, eastern parts of the country?  Or has it outlived its usefulness?  Do chime in with your opinions. 

According to a report from the BBC,  a US federal court has shut down Wikileaks (it used to be at www.wikileaks.org but you won't find anything there now), a controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to post corporate and government documents anonymously.  The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco issued an injunction ordering  Dynadot, which controls the site's domain name, to remove all traces of Wikileaks from its servers.  The court also ordered that Dynadot should prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website and demanded that details of the site's registrant, contacts, payment records and "IP addresses and associated data used by any person...who accessed the account for the domain name"  be handed over.
However, the site remains online in other countries, including Belgium, India and Germany.  The order came because Swiss banking group Julius Baer filed a lawsuit after "several hundred" documents were posted about its offshore activities.  Some of those documents allegedly reveal that Julius Baer was involved in offshore money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands.  Wikileaks  was founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. 

UPDATE: 
Legal Blog Watch also posted on this story today; the posting points to an excellent writeup at the Citizen Media Law Project  that in turn mentions a press release from Wikileaks responding to the injunction which states that  "The order is clearly unconstitutional and exceeds its jurisdiction.  Wikileaks will keep on publishing, in-fact, given the level of suppression involved in this case, Wikileaks will step up publication of documents pertaining to illegal or unethical banking practices."

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