NEH Press Release:
The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress today announced that “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers” is debuting online with more than 226,000 pages of public domain newspapers from California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia, and the District of Columbia published between 1900 and 1910. The text of the [...]
Archive of entries posted on March 2007
Americans can read the news before it was history on new Web site
EU Weighs Copyright Law
From PC World:
Companies from across IT face criminal sanctions, including prison time for employees, if their networks, software programs or online services are ever used to carry illegally copied material such as music or film, according to a draft law from the European Commission supported Tuesday by a committee of the European Parliament.
The proposed directive [...]
Senators won’t take away FBI surveillance power
From News.com:
The FBI’s illegal use of secret methods to obtain confidential information, including telephone and e-mail records, on American citizens, drew criticism from a U.S. Senate panel on Wednesday.
But the committee’s senior members stopped short of calling for a repeal of the portion of the Patriot Act, which Congress hastily approved after September 11, 2001, [...]
EPA to Defang its Inspector General — Immediate Buy-Outs to Remove Auditors, Criminal Investigators and Chemists
The EPA is once again acting on Bush’s proposed budget without waiting for Congress to act. Exactly who holds the purse strings these days anyway? I thought Congress held appropriations authority.
From Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility:
Without waiting for congressional approval, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is moving this month to significantly downsize its [...]
A Hostile Environment for Documents – Why is the EPA’s library being decimated?
From The Scientist:
You’d think that the agency responsible for, say, all clinical information on the effects of pesticides would do anything to keep those systems of information fully operational and to modernize. But in fact, the greatest environmental disaster of this decade may be the amnesia that the White House and EPA seem hell-bent on [...]
Most digital content not stable: archivists
From CBC News:
Those who maintain New Brunswick’s provincial archives are concerned that much of the digital content produced today is not going to make it into the future. . .
. . . Archivists say the domestic digital formats available to the average consumer, such as standard CDs and DVDs, are not stable and were never [...]
Fact Sheet: Department Of Justice Corrective Actions on the FBI’s Use of National Security Letters
From the Department of Justice:
Nearly two weeks ago, the Attorney General commended the work of the Inspector General in uncovering serious problems in the FBI’s use of National Security Letters (NSLs). The Attorney General and the Director of the FBI agreed that such mistakes would not be tolerated, and the Attorney General ordered the FBI [...]
House questions ‘overreaching’ FBI spy powers
From News.com:
Widespread abuse of the FBI’s authority to secretly obtain Americans’ telephone, Internet and financial records drew pointed questioning on Tuesday from a key U.S. House of Representatives panel.
As promised by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), the panel chided U.S. Department of Justice Glenn Fine and FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni about an [...]
Google offers free online services to African universities
From Yahoo! News:
Google announced on Monday that it would provide free online communication services such as e-mail and Internet telephone calling to universities in Kenya and Rwanda.
The Mountain View, California-based Internet search engine giant said it had partnered with the Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure and the Kenya Education Network to deliver hosted Google Apps software [...]
Webcast: Copyright and Access to Knowledge
From the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School:
Mary Wong of Franklin Pierce Law Center joins Berkman Center guests, fellows, and staff to discuss the growing discourse around such topics as “the commons,” “free culture,” and “open content.”
The program runs 63 minutes.