From the Library of Congress:
Curators and public policy experts representing commercial, academic and non-profit organizations convened for a two-day meeting at the Library of Congress to explore strategies for preserving public policy content that has been made available only on the web.
Archive of entries posted on August 2009
Experts Discuss Saving Public Policy Web Content
A Data Deluge Swamps Science Historians
From the Wall Street Journal:
Usually, historians are hard-pressed to find any original source material about those who have shaped our civilization. In the Internet era, scholars of science might have too much. Never have so many people generated so much digital data or been able to lose so much of it so quickly, experts at [...]
Ted Kennedy, Internet Pioneer
From the Sunlight Foundation:
Originally posted 5/22/2008, re-posted 8/26/2009
It sounds silly, but it is, in fact, true. In this month of May, fifteen years ago, Ted Kennedy became the first Senator to communicate with constituents over the Internet. Back in 1993, this was no small feat. At the time there were no congressional offices connected to [...]
Bill would give president emergency control of Internet
From cnet:
Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET [...]
“Librarians shushed no more:” The USA PATRIOT Act, the “Connecticut Four,” and professional ethics
From the abstract:
Upholding user privacy is one of the highest ethical principles in librarianship and is included in most national library associations’ ethical codes. This paper is an account of how the Library Connection, a Connecticut USA consortium, displayed extraordinary courage to protect their users’ privacy on the Internet. To date, the Library Connection’s successful [...]
The House and Senate’s Public — But Not Online — Documents
From the Sunlight Foundation:
Over the last month, Sunlight has examined the document collections of the Office of the House Clerk and Office of the Secretary of the Senate to find out what they have. There seems to be an even split between public documents that are available online and those which you have to visit [...]
Apps for America: The Finalists
From the Sunlight Foundation:
And then there were three. After 47 great entries, we have three finalists in the Apps for America contest, and now it is time for us to figure out the winners. After taking a look at the winners, there’s instructions on how to vote at the end of the post.
GovPulse.us
ThisWeKnow.org
DataMasher
Fed Must Release Reports on Emergency Bank Loans, Judge Says
From Bloomberg:
The Federal Reserve must make records about emergency lending to financial institutions public within five days because it failed to convince a judge the documents should be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
Federal Courts Wary of Document-Sharing Plugin
From Wired:
The federal court system doesn’t seem to like Harlan Yu, or his fellow merry pranksters, who made a tool to free court documents from an unwieldy computer system that has a nasty habit of charging 8 cents a page for public documents.
In fact, the court system’s IT managers is warning that their browser plug-in [...]
The Torture Archive – 83,000 Pages Now Online, Full-text and Indexed
From the National Security Archive:
The National Security Archive announces the publication of the Torture Archive — more than 83,000 pages of primary source documents (and thousands more to come) related to the detention and interrogation of individuals by the United States, in connection with the conduct of hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as [...]