Part-Time Policy Wonk

GPO News Release:
The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) turns the switch on for GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys). This system gives the American people a one-stop site to authentic, published government information. FDsys allows GPO to receive information from federal agencies in all three branches of government and create a repository for permanent, public access. [...]

From Slate:
President Barack Obama’s decision last week to revive the Freedom of Information Act was a good first step toward fulfilling his campaign pledge for a “new era of open government.”
Here’s an idea for a good second step: Force the federal agencies to file and maintain all the records they’re creating now, so that in [...]

From the New York Times:
On Tuesday a group of researchers at the University of Washington are releasing the initial component of a public system to provide authentication for an archive of video interviews with the prosecutors and other members of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Rwandan genocide. The group will also release the first [...]

From North Texas Daily:
President Bush may be gone from the spotlight, but the government Web sites created by agencies during his administration are bringing attention to NT, where the dead sites will be archived in the university’s cyber cemetery.

From the Center for Democracy & Technology:
The minute President Obama assumed his office, before he had even taken his oath, WhiteHouse.gov was updated to reflect the new executive. As expected, the new WhiteHouse.gov used some of the tools that were used online throughout the campaign. In addition, WhiteHouse.gov became drastically more accessible to search engines [...]

From the Daily Mail:
Historians face a ‘black hole’ of lost information if we do not preserve websites and other digital records, the head of the British Library warned today.
Chief executive Lynne Brindley said our cultural heritage is at risk as the internet evolves and technologies become obsolete.

From the Library of Congress:
The Library of Congress will digitally scan “The Heroic Life of Abraham Lincoln: The Great Emancipator” as the 25,000th book in its “Digitizing American Imprints” program, which scans aging “brittle” books often too fragile to serve to researchers. The program is sponsored by a $2 million grant from the Alfred P. [...]

NARA Press Release:
The Office of the Federal Register (OFR), which is part of the National Archives, has created a new publication, to be called the Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents. The Daily Compilation will appear on the Government Printing Office’s (GPO) new Federal Digital System (FDsys) January 20, 2009, to coincide with the incoming President’s [...]

The content of Whitehouse.gov as it was on 20 January 2009 is available online via the National Archives site at:
http://www.archives.gov/presidential-libraries/visit/bushgw.html.

From the GPO:
To help meet the challenge of the digital age, GPO has begun implementing digital signatures to certain electronic documents on GPO Access that not only establish GPO as the trusted information disseminator, but also provide the assurance that an electronic document has not been altered since GPO disseminated it.
The visible digital signatures on [...]