[UPDATE: I spoke too soon. Seems that these are "early access" documents that "will be removed from this database, to be replaced by the fully edited version in the appropriate digital edition in the Rotunda American Founding Era collection."]

Nice work U of Virginia! You can access the papers here. I hope this makes it into the FDLP digitization registry.

More than 200 years after they were written, some 5,000 previously unpublished documents of the founders of the United States — including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison — are at long last available to the public at no cost.

The Documents Compass group of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities at the University of Virginia has spent much of the last year proofreading and transcribing thousands of pages of letters and other papers.

The documents are now available online for free at the University of Virginia Press’ digital imprint called Rotunda...

...The online project is a federal pilot study that aims to expand public access to the papers of America’s founders. It is funded by a $250,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, which is a division of the National Archives.

[Thanks Resource Shelf!]

A new CRS report analyzes President Obama's Executive Order 13489, which rescinds President G.W. Bush's E.O. 13233.

• Presidential Records: Issues for the 111th Congress, by Wendy R. Ginsberg, Congressional Research Service, R40238, February 17, 2009.

On his first full day in office, President Barack Obama issued an executive order (E.O. 13489), rescinding E.O. 13233, changing substantially the presidential record preservation policies promulgated by the George W. Bush Administration. E.O. 13489 grants the incumbent President and the relevant former Presidents 30 days to review records prior to their being released to the public. Under the policies of the Bush Administration, the incumbent President, former Presidents, former Vice Presidents, and their designees were granted broad authority to deny access to presidential documents or to delay their release indefinitely. Moreover, former Presidents had 90 days to review whether requested documents should be released.

Prior to President Obama's issuance of E.O. 13489, legislation was introduced in the 111th Congress (H.R. 35) that would statutorily rescind the executive order (E.O. 13233) issued by former President George W. Bush. E.O. 13233 allowed the incumbent President—as well as former Presidents whose records were affected—to withhold from public disclosure the records of former Presidents and Vice Presidents or to delay their release indefinitely under claims of executive privilege. In addition to statutorily overturning E.O. 13233, H.R. 35 would reduce the time a President would have review his records prior to their public release.

This report will analyze President Barack Obama's E.O. 13489, and discuss its departure from the policies of the previous administration. Additionally, this report will examine H.R. 35 and its possible legislative effects on the presidential records policies of the Obama Administration.

Check it out: www.whitehouse.gov.

Does it go without saying, there is a blog? And, there are a number of feeds (though some are still empty as i write this):

• Agenda Articles Feed
• Press Office Feed
• OMB News Article Feed
• Blog Feed
• Photo Gallery Feed
• Video Feed

And, just to be sure:

Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

-- copyright notice

The National Coalition for History has the story: Presidential Records Reform Act is the First Bill Passed by the New House.

The end may finally be in sight to the seven-year battle historians and archivists have waged to overturn President Bush’s Executive Order 13233 of November 2001 that restricted access to presidential records. On January 7, 2009, the House of Representatives approved H.R. 35, the “Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2009,” by an overwhelmingly bi-partisan vote of 359-58. H.R. 35 was chosen by the House leadership as the first piece of substantive legislation passed in 2009 as a symbol of government transparency.

NARA Cannot Assure Complete Transfer of Bush Records, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, January 5, 2009.

Steven has a link to “National Archives Oversight: Protecting Our Nation’s History for Future Generations,” hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, May 14, 2008 and comments on the the integrity of the process of transferring the records to the National Archives.

Although the President is supposed to obtain the written views of the Archivist prior to any proposed destruction of non-permanent records, "the final disposal authority rests with the incumbent president… regardless of the Archivist’s views."

The New York Times reports today on the problems the National Archives faces in acquiring, organizing, managing, preserving and making available the records of the Bush White House.

• Bush Data Threatens to Overload Archives, By Robert Pear And Scott Shane, New York Times, December 27, 2008.

The National Archives has put into effect an emergency plan to handle electronic records from the Bush White House amid growing doubts about whether its new $144 million computer system can cope with the vast quantities of digital data it will receive when President Bush leaves office on Jan. 20.

Among the problems NARA faces? Volume: NARA anticipates getting 100 terabytes of data 50 times the what they got from the Clinton White House. This is the equivalent of five times the contents of all 20 million catalogued books in the Library of Congress.

Cooperation: "Millions of White House e-mail messages created from 2003 to 2005 appear to be missing and may not be recoverable. And in September 2007, the top lawyer at the National Archives wrote in a memorandum that he had 'made almost zero progress' planning the transition because the White House had ignored repeated requests for information about the volume and formats of electronic records." In addition, Vice-President Cheney's lawyers claimed in a court filing that neither NARA nor the court "may supervise the vice president or his office" for compliance with the Presidential Records Act.

Formats: NARA says that there are a large numbers of White House records created with proprietary commercial software.

Access: Paul Brachfeld, the archives' inspector general, said "The electronic records archives system may be able to take in a tremendous amount of e-mail and other records.... But just because you ingest the data does not mean that people can locate, identify, recover and use the records they need."

Miller Center Offers Nixon/Deep Throat Tapes, Transcripts, Expert, NewsWise, University of Virginia, Press Release: Fri 19-Dec-2008.

The Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia has a repository of presidential tapes and transcripts featuring Nixon and Haldeman discussing Mark Felt.

The Presidential Recordings Program (http://millercenter.org/academic/presidentialrecordings) at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs (http://www.millercenter.org) has a spectacular Watergate collection of Nixon tapes and transcripts online:

• http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu/transcript/nixon/watergate

In particular, there's this Oct. 19, 1972 conversation between Nixon and Robert Haldeman, in which Haldeman reports that he's heard from a confidential source that Mark Felt is leaking information to the news media about the FBI's investigation into the Watergate break-in:
• http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu/clips/1972_1019_felt/

Nixon also mentions Felt in the June 23, 1972 "Smoking Gun" conversation with Haldeman:
• http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu/transcript/nixon/smoking-gun

PRP scholar Ken Hughes puts the Nixon tapes in perspective in an online essay, Why Didn't Nixon Burn the Tapes? -- which also includes tapes and transcripts of Nixon-Haldeman conversations.

• http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu/exhibit/why-didnt-nixon-burn-tape...

Also feel free to use these tapes and transcripts in your stories and online exhibits, and to link to the transcripts....

Bush E-Mails May Be Secret a Bit Longer, by R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post, December 21, 2008; A01.

Legal Battles, Technical Difficulties Delay Required Transfer to Archives...

The required transfer in four weeks of all of the Bush White House's electronic mail messages and documents to the National Archives has been imperiled by a combination of technical glitches, lawsuits and lagging computer forensic work, according to government officials, historians and lawyers.

...The risks that the transfer may be incomplete are also pointed up by a continuing legal battle between a coalition of historians and nonprofit groups over access to Vice President Cheney's records. The coalition is contesting the administration's assertion in federal court this month that he "alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records" and "how his records will be created, maintained, managed, and disposed," without outside challenge or judicial review.

...The National Archives and Records Administration is supposed to help monitor the completeness of the historical record but has no enforcement powers over White House records management practices.

This announcement from C-SPAN may be of interest:

Join C-SPAN for White House Week! This 7-day television event kicks off on December 14 with the premiere of a 90-minute feature documentary, The White House: Inside America's Most Famous Home -- a C-SPAN original production. White House Week takes you beyond the velvet ropes to the private residence, sharing exclusive interviews with the First Family, the White House staff, and renowned presidential historians.
 
The White House: Inside America's Most Famous Home, which headlines the weeklong series, recounts highlights of America's most famous home -- from George Washington's first design decisions to an exclusive tour of the private residence given by First Lady Laura Bush.
 
And that's only the beginning. After the documentary premiere, six additional nights of special White House programming will air on C-SPAN. Programs will feature rare footage, behind-the-scenes video, and extended interviews with historians, White House staff, and other experts -- all providing an unprecedented look into the public spaces of the White House and the private home of our nation's First Families.
 
Produced with assistance from First Lady Laura Bush and the White House Historical Association, this weeklong series is the most comprehensive look at the White House ever offered in video, bringing this treasured landmark alive for viewers across the country.
 
You can get inside the White House ahead of time by visiting www.c-span.org/whitehouse today. View the trailer, interviews with historians, footage from the documentary, and content from the C-SPAN archives -- with more video added every week.
 
The White House: America's Most Famous Home premieres December 14 at 9 pm ET on C-SPAN. Additional original programming will air nightly at 9 pm ET through December 20.

Following up on the report about NARA's Executive Office of the President (EOP) Electronic Records Archives (ERA) (http://freegovinfo.info/node/2178), here is a story that goes in to more detail, much of it quite scary.

• Bush's exit to put new e-records system to the test, By Mary Brandel, Computerworld, November 21, 2008.

Deb Logan, an analyst at Gartner Inc., says in the article that the onerous task will be sorting through the unclassified and unprocessed data that the Bush administration will leave behind. "It would be one thing if the stuff had to be moved seamlessly to a records repository, but it's just eight years of stuff," she says. "It will be nearly impossible to get it under control without a massive expenditure of human resources because the technology is not there."

This is scary when one considers that it took NARA over a year to process the 2 Terabytes of data from the Clinton administration and NARA expects 140 Terabytes of data from the Bush administration. Even given that NARA now has a system in place that did not exist for processing the Clinton data, there is a big difference between the dealing with the technology issues and the information management issues:

Logan says part of the blame lies with federal agencies themselves, pointing to a GAO survey that concluded federal agencies have failed across the board to fulfill their records management obligations, "not out of malice or neglect but out of the nature of the volume of electronic communications and the time frame in which they have to do it," she says. "Anyone who's putting an optimistic face on the job is not being realistic."

Optimism may be relevant from a technology point of view, Thibodeau acknowledges, but not from an information management point of view. "From my side of NARA, I don't deal with what's in the records, just whether we can get them into the system," he notes. "We allow the library staff to deal with the content."

...Logan says the problem of managing electronic records won't be resolved until the government agencies themselves do a better job of electronic records management, including classifying, de-duplicating and purging data through the use of systems such as archiving, records and policy management, content monitoring/filtering, and content analytics tools.

A GAO report says, "NARA believes that if it cannot ingest the Bush records in a way that supports search and retrieval immediately after the transition, it may not be able to effectively respond to requests from the Congress, the new administration, and the courts for these records—a critical agency mission." (The National Archives and Records Administration’s Fiscal Year 2008 Expenditure Plan, September 2008, GAO-08-1105.)

Chris Soghoian at CNet makes some interesting arguments for Why Obama should ditch YouTube (November 24, 2008).

He says that the "use of YouTube and Google Analytics by the Obama transition team violates the privacy of Web site visitors and possibly even violates federal rules banning the use of permanent tracking cookies on government sites" and that the government should host its own videos.

...when a regular YouTube user views a video embedded in a blog or other third-party site, the user's cookie is automatically sent to YouTube's servers--even without the user clicking the play button. Given the widespread use of embedded videos, this gives Google, which owns YouTube, an even better idea of the surfing habits of millions of people around the world.

He suggests: "By all means, use streaming video to reach the masses, but let the bits flow from government-owned servers (preferably without privacy-invading cookies). If bloggers wish to embed YouTube videos of the speech on their own sites, that is fine. But Obama shouldn't."

I would go a step further by challenging the new President to use open-format standards for video and audio so that they can be preserved.

The National Coalition for History has a report on the meeting of the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) in November where there were discussions of the declassification, archival processing, and release of the 9/11 Commission records and the National Archives and Records Administration's Electronic Records Archives (ERA):

• Electronic Records Archives & 9/11 Commission Records Update, National Coalition for History, November 26th, 2008.

Two interesting tidbits:

Ken Thibodeau, Director of NARA’s Electronic Records Archive (ERA), reported that four federal agencies are currently using ERA system and that all federal agencies should be using the ERA by January 2011.

Thibodeau also reported on the upcoming transfer of the electronic records from the Bush administration to the National Archives. NARA is developing a separate system, known as the Executive Office of the President (EOP) ERA, to ingest an estimated 100 terabytes of electronic records from the Bush administration.

Change.Gov, the "Office of the President Elect," is a .gov site, but it says "Content copyright © 2008 by Obama-Biden Transition Project, a 501c(4) organization. All rights reserved."

So, is this an official government web site? Will it be captured by the transition crawl?

Steven Clift has a few comments here.

The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara has archived all Presidential Signing Statements from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush.

• Presidential Signing Statements Hoover - G.W. Bush

You can search or browse by year. The signing statements are part of a much larger documents section that includes executive orders, proclamations, "fireside chats" and more.

The Project site also includes a "data" section with information such as a table of vetoes and "success rate", a section on presidential elections data (statistics) and more.

The American Presidency Project

This online archive, maintained by the University of California at Santa Barbara, contains over 72,000 documents related to the U.S. Presidency.

The searchable database includes:

•The Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Washington - Taft (1789-1913)

•The Public Papers of the Presidents:
Hoover to Bush (1929-1993)

•The Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents:
Clinton - G.W. Bush (1993-2007)

These documents include Executive Orders and Proclamations, State of the Union Addresses, Inaugural Addresses, press conferences, and much more.