Radreffies' blogs

author:  Lu, Marie

Following Legend, Prodigy is a tale of a divided, dystopic America, from the perspective of the commie side's two most notorious outlaws, both fifteen. They discover that the corporate side is no heaven either, nor is the resistance of the former that they've been drawn into supporting.

reviewdate:  Mar 13 2013 isn:  978-0-399-25675-9

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With the advent of the March updating season, the past two weeks have been very busy for volunteers at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases.

That is, except for Hawaii, Minnesota and Oklahoma. These pages have languished for over a year without a volunteer documents specialist to care for them.

If you would like to brighten the day of one of these pages by adopting them, read through the project's volunteer guide, then contact Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com.

On to our extensive activities. For a full blow by blow report of updates and other activity for the past two weeks, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs14d. Here are the highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (Susan Paterson)

Recreation Centers and Pools - Find swimming pools, basketball courts, before- and after-school care programs, and other programs at parks and recreation centers in the District of Columbia. Also can find status of projects improvements and permit facilities.

KANSAS (Pam Crawford)

Photo Library - From the web site: "The KGS Photo Library is a collection of photos of different subjects from around the state. These photos may be used for any non-commercial purpose; if you use a photo, please credit the Kansas Geological Survey. To select photos to view: (1) click on one of the terms under the Subjects menu, (2) enter a term (or terms) in the Keywords search, or (3) use one of the three maps to select photos by county, physiographic region, or highway."

NEVADA (Kathy Edwards)

Teacher Licensure - Search for the credentials of a public school teacher by entering the teacher's name or license number.

NEW HAMPSHIRE (Linda Johnson)

New Hampshire Vital Records Information Network Web Query] Search for birth, death, marriage, and divorce events. Data very current for most statistics. Password required.

OHIO (Audrey Hall)

Utility Information - Find utility information by street address.

NEW MATERIAL ON "NOT DATABASES" PAGE

In the course of searching for databases, our project volunteers come across interesting and/or useful resources that fall outside of our project scope. Rather than just forgetting these resources, we post them to our "not databases" page.

In the past two weeks, two resources have been added to this page:

Smart Consumer - From the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection, separate pages directed toward parents and children, teens, young adults, adults, and older adults raise awareness of potential scams. Recommendations about what to know and what to do are given for various scam topics.

New York State Vital Statistics - The tables listed here provide information on vital statistics in New York State, such as mortality, birth rate, marriage and population.

Come on, you know you want to run it!!!

James and I are happy to announce that our new article appears in the current edition of D-Lib Magazine:

• The Digital-Surrogate Seal of Approval: a Consumer-oriented Standard. by James A. Jacobs and James R. Jacobs. D-Lib Magazine, 2013, 19(3/4). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/march2013-jacobs

In the last few years, there have been a series of articles, reports and proposals that rely on the promises of digitization to address issues of physical space, cost control, access, and collection management for FDLP libraries. One of the reasons we created this Seal of Approval standard is to provide a clear, consistent way to help evaluate some of these promises of digitization.

There are those who continue to insist that we have too many copies of federal documents, that preserving those copies is too expensive, that GPO is being unreasonable when it does not allow libraries to discard materials, and so forth. Although proposals to digitize FDLP collections are often couched in terms of enhancing access, libraries can digitize and enhance access without discarding paper copies. The underlying motivation of such proposals is often explicitly to weed the paper collections and, when not explicit, it is always implied. These proposals raise many questions in our minds. For example:

• Will digitizations include digital text as well as images and will the text be accurate and complete and (re)usable?
• Will the digitizations be readable and usable on modern e-book devices?
• Will digitizations create digital objects that are as good as the originals, or worse, or better?
• Will digitizations be deposited into Trusted Digital Repositories to ensure their long-term preservation and access?
• Will the library that contributes the original be in control of the digital copy, or will control be ceded to large mega-libraries?
• Will the digitizations include adequate metadata for management, preservation, and discovery?
• Will libraries develop and maintain discovery and delivery mechanisms that address the special requirements of federal documents?
• Will libraries provide adequate digital services for the digital collections?
• Will any cost savings be applied to collection management and services for these collections or will the cost savings be redirected to other collections and services?
• Will there actually be cost savings if we adequately address the above questions?

But there is one other question that is more important than all of the above. The question we must ask first is: Are the digitizations accurate and complete? If they are not, the other questions become moot or irrelevant. The DS-SOA is intended to help us answer that question. The DS-SOA denotes that a digitization accurately and completely replicates the content and presentation of the original.

The standard is designed to be easily understood and usable, not just by digitization-specialists, but also by library administrators, collection managers, service providers, preservation officers, business managers, and others who are responsible for library collections and services. It is also meant to help communicate clearly to end users the accuracy and completeness of the digitizations libraries provide to them.

We believe that libraries fulfill a unique role in society, one that is different from that of producers, agencies, publishers, authors, and vendors. We believe that the value of libraries is dependent upon the collections we select, acquire, preserve, and maintain and the services that we provide for those collections. The FDLP collections are unique; they provide a primary-source, historical record of our democracy. The FDLP print collections are not "legacy collections" as they are often called by those who wish to discard them; (the use of the word "legacy" as an adjective means "outdated" and "unwanted"). They are, however, our legacy. The use of the word "legacy" as a noun means bequest, heritage, endowment, gift, and birthright. The DS-SOA is a simple tool that libraries can use to ensure the value of their digital collections and communicate that value to library users. We believe that failure to ensure completeness and accuracy of our digital collections will reduce the value of libraries. We believe that replacing paper-and-ink books with digital copies without first ensuring and documenting that those copies are complete and accurate representations of the original would be tantamount to redacting the historical record of our democracy.

[Update 3/15/13: Here's the ALA announcement.]

It was just announced that Aaron Swartz will be awarded the American Library Association's James Madison Award awarded annually to "honor individuals or groups who have championed, protected and promoted public access to government information and the public’s “right to know” on the national level." It is fitting that Aaron win the award -- and be presented by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), a strong advocate for digital rights in Congress who won the award last year and who introduced Aaron's Law to try and amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

The ceremony will be webcast live tomorrow (Friday March 15, 2013) at 8:30am eastern time. We'll post the video as soon as its made available.

[Editor's note: This is a guest post from Amanda Wakaruk, Government Information Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries.]

Over the past week, the British Columbia Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA) wrote about and then provided the public with access to documentation outlining a Web Renewal Action Plan that calls for the reduction of Government of Canada (GoC) websites from roughly 1500 down to 1 (see FIPA’s blog entries, linked below). This plan appears to exacerbate the problems I noted in an FGI blog post last year: Government of Canada Publications -– It’s About Access, Not Format. For example, there is no publicly available evidence that the GoC has implemented or plans to implement a comprehensive web archiving plan before reducing its web footprint.

As a practitioner, I run into the problem of missing (i.e., unarchived) born digital content on a regular basis. (And no, Library and Archives Canada is not collecting websites for public consumption – these programs stopped in 2009.) The question I lost sleep over last year is more pressing than ever: who is archiving the web content of the GoC?

A group of institutions is working hard to setup a LOCKSS network that will help preserve the content of the Depository Services Program’s (DSP) e-archive (see the nascent CGI-PLN Wiki – email me if you would like to become a member or can help with funding to try and make this content accessible in the event that we lose access to the DSP website). Our first collection -- as important and impressive as it is at over 110,000 pdfs -- only represents a fraction of the content produced by the GoC. (As you might recall, the DSP does not collect html, only pdfs… and the latter format is discouraged by current GoC web protocols).

I am proud of the fact that the University of Alberta Libraries, my home institution, was able to capture select GoC websites using a fee-based (and US-based) Archive-IT account but no single academic institution can afford to act as steward for the output of the federal government. Happily, we have a colleague in the University of Toronto Libraries, who started capturing GoC web content using Archive-IT a few weeks ago as part of a joint “rescue mission” to save the contents of the Aboriginal Portal of Canada before it was deleted from government servers (the results of these crawls are accessible here and here).

The bigger question, of course, is this: If not the government, then who is responsible for collecting and preserving the born digital content of the GoC? If it *is* the academic sector’s responsibility then where will the funding come from? Recent provincial budget cuts in Ontario and Alberta have been hard on this sector, to say the least. If there is a White Knight out there, now would be a great time to step forward!

The elimination of print publications coupled with a lack of web archiving and a directive to make only ‘current’ information available online marks an incalculable loss. Countless students describe the sessional papers as “life changing” and scholars from all walks of life routinely draw on statistical information produced by their governments to help make sense of our place in the world and inform ways to improve it (as an aside, Statistics Canada plans to remove publications more than a few years old from their website). It is unthinkable that future generations will not have access to information produced by their government today… information that should be informing our cultural narrative.

Reaction to Web Renewal Action Plan

• Harper Government Centralizing, Slashing Federal Web Info
• Federal Open Government Minister Not a Fan of Open Government. Vincent Gogolek, Executive Director, Freedom of Information and Privacy Association Huffington Post Canada, British Columbia

  - first post includes links to the Web Renewal Action Plan
  http://fipa.bc.ca/library/Government%20Documents/GoC_web_plan_Part1.pdf
  http://fipa.bc.ca/library/Government%20Documents/GoC_web_plan_Part2.pdf

• Stephen Harper asked Tony Clement to ‘significantly reduce’ number of government websites, says document. Mike de Souza, Edmonton Journal.
• Historical letters not wanted at Library and Archives Canada, critics say. Joseph Hall, Toronto Star
• Tories Restrict Online Data Mining, But Not for Social Media. Globe and Mail

Man, this week is Sunshine-week-alicious! The Sunlight Foundation has long advocated for -- along with FGI, library- and open govt organizations -- the free public access to Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports. CRS Reports are commonly not available to the public as CRS has this arcane and outdated rule that CRS reports are privileged communication between Congress and CRS. But CRS reports ARE available randomly online and Proquest, Penny Hill Press and other commercial publishers have long published them for a fee (I've even heard that CRS subscribes to Proquest to get access to their own reports historically!).

But this all may change. According to the Sunlight Blog, Representatives Leonard Lance (R-NJ) and Mike Quigley (D-IL) have reintroduced the bipartisan House Resolution 110 "Public Access to Congressional Research Service Reports Resolution of 2013" (text not received by GPO yet so not publicly available on Thomas). The Resolution would direct the Clerk of the House of Representatives to provide members of the public with Internet access to certain Congressional Research Service publications. Easy-peasy right?!

More than 30 organizations -- including Sunlight Foundation and FGI -- have signed on to a letter supporting the resolution. Please consider contacting your Representative and ask them to support H.Res. 110!

Open CRS Resolution Support Letter

[UPDATE 4/2/13: We've had some questions about the meaning of "ALL." Please read the comment thread for clarification. We don't mean "records" (which fall under FOIA) and we don't mean classified information. We mean public domain documents, publications, reports, data, statistics and the like. JRJ]

A convergence of several things -- the White House's new policy on Open Access to federally funded scientific information, the NAPA Report on the GPO, the CASSANDRA Letter to the Public Printer, and Sunshine Week among them -- has led us to create a petition on the White House's We the People petition site. If you believe in free permanent public access to authentic government information, we hope you'll sign the petition and forward on to all your friends and social networks to help us reach our goal of 100,000 signatures by April 11, 2013! Thanks in advance!!

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:

Require free online permanent public access to ALL federal government information and publications.

1. Assure that GPO has the funds to continue to maintain and develop the Federal Digital System (FDsys).

2. Raise ALL Congressional, Executive & Judicial branch information, publications & data to the level of federally funded scientific information & publish ALL government information as "Open Access."

3. Mandate the free permanent public access to other Federal information currently maintained in fee-based databases - including the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER), the National Technical Reports Library (NTRL), & USA Trade Online.

4. Establish an interagency, govt-wide strategy to manage the entire lifecycle of digital government information w/ FDLP Libraries - publication, access, usability, bulk download, long-term preservation, standards & metadata.

Background:

The National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) completed an operational review of the Government Printing Office (GPO) mandated under the 2012 Consolidated Appropriations Act (Public Law 112-74). The NAPA report, “Rebooting the Government Printing Office: Keeping America Informed in the Digital Age,” acknowledged the obligation Congress has to establish an interagency government-wide strategy to manage the lifecycle of digital government information. The report also acknowledged the vital role GPO plays in providing free permanent public access to authentic government information in tangible formats through its Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) and to authentic government information in electronic formats via GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDSys).

However, Recommendation 4 states: “GPO and Congress should explore alternative funding models for the Federal Digital System in order to ensure a stable and sufficient funding source.” Among the models recommended are “…reimbursement for services; fees for end users; dedicated appropriations; and/or an automatic charge to agencies, depending on size, to encourage agencies to take advantage of GPO’s existing infrastructure and cover the cost of the services being provided by GPO.”

Just as the Obama Administration supports the public’s right to “free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research,” the Administration must support the creation of “stable and sufficient funding” to ensure free permanent public access to authentic government information arising from the work of taxpayer-funded Executive, Congressional, and Judicial Branch agencies.

Notes:

1. NAPA report, “Rebooting the Government Printing Office: Keeping America Informed in the Digital Age.”
2. CASSANDRA Letter to US Public Printer in response to the NAPA Report.
3. Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research. John P. Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
4. White House response to "We The People" petition "Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research"
5. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Information Management: National Technical Information Service's Dissemination of Technical Reports Needs Congressional Attention. GAO-13-99, November 19, 2012. Context on the GAO report from FGI.
6. GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys): http://fdsys.gov
7. PACER: http://www.pacer.gov
8. National Technical Reports Library (NTRL): http://ntrl.ntis.gov
9. USAtrade: https://www.usatradeonline.gov
10. Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). http://fdlp.gov

Last month the National Association of Public Administration (NAPA) released a report entitled "Rebooting the Government Printing Office: Keeping America Informed in the Digital Age" -- FGI responded with an analysis of the report and were particularly disturbed by recommendation #4 which said that GPO should consider "cost recovery" for access to FDsys.

A group of long-time government information librarians writing under the moniker of CASSANDRA (Concerned Government Information Professionals), have co-written a letter to Public Printer Davita Vance-Cooks offering their strong support for NAPA's conclusion that "free access to government information is both an important tenet of a democracy and a critical responsibility" while calling into question the same recommendation #4.

With CASSANDRA's permission (FYI, both Jim Jacobs and James Jacobs are signatories to this letter), we've posted the letter here for public knowledge and so that others may also write letters to the Public Printer and cite this letter in support of free permanent public access to authentic government information now and in the long-term.

The Sunlight Foundation just put out their Open Legislative Data Report Card. California received a D grade :-| Find out how your state is doing. Below is the methodology that they used to grade state legislatures.

Methodology

Each state was evaluated in six categories based largely on the Ten Principles For Opening Up Government Information. Each score is based on at least two members of staff and a volunteer during our state survey. Additionally, state legislatures were contacted (unless noted in their score) to ensure that our information on bulk data availability and timeliness was as accurate as possible.

The specific criteria for each category are as follows:

COMPLETENESS

We evaluated each state on the data collected by Open States: bills, legislators, committees, votes and events. We also took note if a state went above and beyond to provide this information and other relevant contextual information such as supporting documents, legislative journals and schedules. Points were deducted for missing data, often roll call votes.

• 0 State provides full breadth of legislative artifacts Open States collects: bills, legislators, votes, and committees.
• -1 State does not provide stand-alone roll call votes.

TIMELINESS

Legislative information is most relevant when it happens, and many states are publishing information in real time. Unfortunately, there are also states where updates are more infrequent and showing up days after a legislative action took place. States were dinged if data took more than 48 hours to go online.

• 1 Multiple updates throughout the day, real time or as close to it as systems will allow.
• 0 Site updates once or twice daily, typically at the end of the legislative day.
• -1 Updates take longer than 24 hours to appear on the site, often up to a week.

EASE OF ACCESS

Common web technologies such as Flash or JavaScript can cause problems when reviewing legislative data. We found that the majority of sites work fairly well without JavaScript, but some received lower scores due to being extremely difficult to navigate, impossible to bookmark bills, and in extreme cases, completely unusable.

• 1 Site was considered exceptionally well layed out by multiple evaluators, no issues with Javascript.
• 0 Site was deemed average by those that evaluated it and/or had minor Javascript dependencies.
• -1 Site was considered more difficult than average to use by members of staff or volunteers or had more severe Javascript dependencies.
• -2 Site was considered extremely difficult to use with a heavy reliance on irregular browser behavior and Javascript.

MACHINE READABILITY

For many sites, the Open States team wrote scrapers to collect legislative information from the website code—a slow, tedious and error prone process. We collected data faster and more reliably when data was provided in a machine-readable format such as XML, JSON, CSV or via bulk downloads. If a state posted PDF image files or scanned documents, it received the lowest score possible.

• 2 Essentially all data can be found in machine-readable formats.
• 1 Lots of data in machine readable format but substantial portions that still required scraping HTML.
• 0 No machine readable data but standard screen scraping techniques applied.
• -1 Site had information that was much more difficult than average to collect. (Data only accessible via PDF or that required screen scraper to emulate Javascript.)
• -2 Site had information that was unaccessible to Open States due to use of scanned PDFs.

USE OF COMMONLY OWNED STANDARDS

Because our ability to access most of a state’s data is represented by the above “Machine Readability” metric, we decided to use this provision to measure how a state made their bill text available. Making text available in HTML or PDF is the norm, and was considered an acceptable commonly owned standard (PDFs are a commonly owned standard, but it would be certainly nice to see alternative options where bill text is only available via PDF). States that only make documents available in Microsoft Word or Wordperfect formats require an individual to purchase expensive software or rely on free alternatives that may not preserve the correct formatting. It is worth noting, all states except for two met the common criteria of providing HTML and/or PDF only, one state (Kansas) went above and beyond and another (Kentucky) did not even meet this threshold.

• 1 State made an effort to go above and beyond.
• 0 State provided bills in PDF and/or HTML format and nothing better (plaintext, ODT, etc.).
• -1 State only provided bills in a proprietary format.

PERMANENCE

Many states move or remove information when a new session starts, much to the dismay of citizens seeking information on old proposals and researchers that may have cited a link (e.g. http://somelegislature.gov/HB1 vs http://somelegislature.gov/2011/HB1) only to see it point to a different bill in the following session. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote an article declaring Cool URIs Don’t Change and we agree.

This poses a particular challenge to us since every page on OpenStates.org points to the page we collected data from, but if a state changes their site then users lose the ability to check us against the original source. Most (but not all) states are good about at least preserving bill information, but few were equally as good about preserving information about out-of-office legislators and historical committees, equally important parts of the legislative process.

• 2 All information is avaialble in a permanent location and data goes back a reasonable amount of time (a decade or so).
• 1 Almost all information has a permanent location but a single data set doesn't. (Or a recent change to the site has wiped out historical links but information appears to be preservable going forward.)
• 0 Legislator & committee information lacks a permanent location (such as committees and legislators) but most is acceptable.
• -1 Ability to link to old information is badly damaged and and/or there is less than a decade of historical information.
• -2 Vital information like bills or versions lack a permanent location.

The Archive-it team announced today the publication of their White Paper Web Archiving Life Cycle Model. The model offers a thorough description of the entire process of Web archiving. Whether you've been Web archiving for 7 years or mulling about jumping in to the fray, this model will put you in a good headspace to do this critical work. Thanks Molly Bragg, Kristine Hanna, Lori Donovan, Graham Hukill, and Anna Peterson!

The Archive-It team is excited to publish our first white paper: The Web Archiving Life Cycle Model. With this paper we hope to share web archiving best practices and processes with organizations interested in developing and/or expanding their web archiving initiatives.

This white paper is the product of a collaboration between members of the Archive-It team as well as the larger Archive-It partner community. Several partners took part in in-depth interviews regarding their experiences using Archive-It and web archiving in general, and others helped with the design iteration phase of the model and read preliminary drafts of the paper.

The Web Archiving Life Cycle Model encompasses the following web archiving processes:

• Vision and Objectives
• Resources and Workflow
• Access/Use/Reuse
• Preservation
• Risk Management
• Appraisal and Selection
• Scoping
• Data Capture
• Storage and Organization
• Quality Assurance and Analysis

Blah blah blah 50k. I somehow PRd, but mainly bc I've mostly run mountain 50ks with the exception of Burning Man where drinking large quantities of alcohol before (along w small quantities during the race) didn't help for a good race. So I PRd at this, but was almost an hour slower than what I hoped for. Oh well. A PR is a PR is a PR.

The plan was to go out at 8min pace. And maintain. Easy, right?

I kept up with that for the first four laps (the laps were 5k each). And then my tummy started feeling wretched and this incredible pain that plagued my feet during the Brooklyn Half started. I cried out to Wayne, who was watching me for some bizarre reason (Love, I suppose...otherwise,why would you go out to an ultra in freezing cold March?) and he got me advil. Normally I don't like to take that sort of thing during a race (It's not a good idea to take NSAIDs during races, but I had tears in my eyes from the pain.). 

Tony caught back up w me and cheered me up. And then I caught up to Mary and we finished together.




I cried at the finish, sad at my misery, how far off I was from my goal. Then I walked out to meet Ray K and chat w him during part of his final lap. Then I got a ride bk to the city with an old school ultrarunner.

And it was a week ago. My legs are tired from a 17+ mile morning run and 11 mile evening run. I would like a nap please. No bed.

The Lower East Side Librarian Library of Congress Subject Headings of the month for Month 1, January 22, 2013 are...

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author:  Wilson, G. Willow

A middle-class white American who grew up atheist comes out as Muslim. Though she has to convert officially to be square with Egypt, the way Wilson describes her relationship with the religion calls to mind realizing or accepting that you're gay, not becoming so.

Quotations: 

Personality, that compromise between one's soul and one's culture.

reviewdate:  Mar 8 2013 isn:  978-0-8021-1887-5

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C-SPAN's American Artifacts series will air a segment on the Government Printing Office (GPO) on March 17 at 8am and 7pm Eastern time. Check out the preview below, with GPO Historian George Barnum.

This week in his weekly Time to Wake Up speech, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) speaks about climate change making the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) High Risk List for the first time this year. GAO's High Risk List is published every two years at the start of every new Congress since 1990. GAO "calls attention to agencies and program areas that are high risk due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or are most in need of transformation."

"According to GAO, and I’ll quote again, “The nation’s vulnerability can be reduced by limiting the magnitude of climate change through actions to limit greenhouse gas emissions. . . . While implementing adaptive measures may be costly, [GAO continues] there is a growing recognition that the cost of inaction could be greater and—given the government’s precarious fiscal position—increasingly difficult to manage given expected budget pressures.”'

"Mr. President, Congress has been asleep long enough. We have a tradition in this body of taking the accounting of GAO, our non-partisan watchdog, seriously, and of taking GAO’s High Risk List seriously. GAO now joins our defense and intelligence communities, our scientific research communities, and our state and local governments, and major sectors of private industry, who have all elevated climate change from their “to-do” list to their “must-do” list. Mr. President, it is time for Congress to wake up to its duties, and to get to work."

According to the Air Force Times, the Air Force has reversed their policy of sharing monthly statistics on the number of airstrikes launched from drones (aka remotely piloted aircraft (RPA)). In the interest of access and transparency, we've posted the original statistics from December '12, January '13, and February '13.

As scrutiny and debate over the use of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) by the American military increased last month, the Air Force reversed a policy of sharing the number of airstrikes launched from RPAs in Afghanistan and quietly scrubbed those statistics from previous releases kept on their website.

Last October, Air Force Central Command started tallying weapons releases from RPAs, broken down into monthly updates. At the time, AFCENT spokeswoman Capt. Kim Bender said the numbers would be put out every month as part of a service effort to “provide more detailed information on RPA ops in Afghanistan.”

The Air Force maintained that policy for the statistics reports for November, December and January. But the February numbers, released March 7, contained empty space where the box of RPA statistics had previously been.

Additionally, monthly reports hosted on the Air Force website have had the RPA data removed — and recently.

Those files still contained the RPA data as of Feb. 16, according to archived web pages accessed via Archive.org. Metadata included in the new, RPA-less versions of the reports show the files were all created Feb. 22.

This will be well worth your time! Listen, grok, act!

On Tuesday, Feb. 19, Lawrence Lessig marked his appointment as Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School with a lecture titled "Aaron's Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age." The lecture honored the memory and work of Aaron Swartz, the programmer and activist who took his own life on Jan. 11, 2013 at the age of 26. Swartz spent the last two years fighting federal charges that he violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

On his blog, Lessig wrote, “When a law professor is given a “chair” s/he gives a lecture in honor of the honor. … After Aaron’s death, I asked the Dean to let me reschedule the lecture. But after some more thought, I’ve decided to make the lecture about Aaron, and about how we need to honor his work.”

A bill in the Minnesota legislature would allow government agencies to post official notices on their web sites instead of in newspapers and would require a "permanent record" of publications to be "maintained." Included would be publication of transportation projects, proceedings, official notices, and summaries of meetings. The bill apparently does not designate who will preserve the information nor does it specify how to preserve the information except for the caveat that the records must be in "a form accessible by the public."

• H.F. No. 1286, as introduced - 88th Legislative Session (2013-2014) Posted on Mar 05, 2013.

  Subd. 4. Record retention. A political subdivision that publishes notice on its Web site under this section must ensure that a permanent record of publication is maintained in a form accessible by the public.

We would, of course, like to see a bit more detail of the implementation, perhaps even including requirements for deposit of records in a Trusted Repository, provisions for discovery, access, use, and bulk download, and, ideally, a state-law-compliant deposit into libraries.

One section of the bill does specify that print copies of "documents" published on the web must be made available at all public libraries within the jurisdiction. This is not a bad requirement, but it does seem to us to be short-sighted to require deposit of paper copies and not require deposit of digital copies. Libraries could provide enhanced access and service over what the government could provide and could provide redundant digital preservation.

Subd. 5. Print copies. When a political subdivision publishes exclusively on the Web site, it must also make print copies of all published documents available at the main office of the political subdivision, any other government offices designated by the political subdivision, all public libraries within the jurisdiction, and by mail upon request.

I should have written this a long time ago. My delay comes not from hesitation or indecision but from illness, and for that, I apologize. My thoughts may be late in coming, but they are no less sincere.

I am a librarian. My father, John M. Crossett, was a Classics professor. He was also, albeit not until after he died, an Edwin Mellen Press author. The Press published the Festschrift his former students and colleagues compiled in his honor and later the translation and commentary of Longinus’s On the Sublime that he did with James A. Arieti. Although I have been in touch with many of the people involved in both publications, the words and opinions here are my own.

Dale Askey is also a librarian. Several years ago, he published a blog post critical of the quality of the scholarship and books put out by Edwin Mellen Press. The blog post has since been removed, but Edwin Mellen Press sued both Askey and his current employer. Mellen has now dropped at least one of those lawsuits, citing, among other things, “social media pressure,” and, among others, that it is “a small company” and “must choose its resources on its business and its authors.”

I signed a petition asking Mellen to drop the lawsuit.

I know, at least by name and reputation, many of the people involved in the social media pressure, although I also know there are many more.

Librarians, like many professionals, are often quick to spring to the defense of one of their own, and we have done so in this case — the case of a man in trouble for having an opinion.

My father was a man of many opinions. Many of those opinions made him unpopular in the times and places that he taught. But his ideas — in the form of those who did admire him — found a home at Edwin Mellen, and I am grateful to the Press for that. My copy of Hamartia, inscribed by its editors to me, is one of my most cherished possessions.

There are few things my father and I would have agreed on (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, gay marriage, abortion, and the Western canon spring immediately to mind as points of divergence). But I believe that he would agree with me on this one thing: a lawsuit is no way to respond to criticism. The proper response in a scholarly community to a disagreement is not to sue to but to argue. Make your case. Support your argument with examples from the text, from critics, from experts, from data.

John Milton, one of my father’s favorites, one of mine, and, I daresay, one of yours wrote

For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand, unlesse warinesse be us’d, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.

Mellen has made a promise to keep all its books in print, and it has done so, thus preserving some life-blood that is quite precious to me, but I am just me. The quality of Mellen’s books as a whole, their place in libraries, and their contributions to scholarly discourse I leave for others to judge — I am a public librarian, not an academic. But as I judge books by their contents, I judge men and women by their characters. Dale Askey had the courage to voice an opinion. Edwin Mellen Press, on the other hand — you had the cowardice to try to shut that down. You believe Dale Askey tried to kill a good book, but he did not. He burned nothing; he destroyed nothing. You, on the other hand, are attempting to kill off the voice of a man. No one who claims to work in the tradition Milton defended, no one who “remains resolute that all have the right to free speech,” has any right to shut down a disagreement with a lawsuit — not, at least, if they wish to be found to be of good character.