Free Government Information

The Sunlight Foundation has just released Open States for all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The site helps the public find their state legislators, review their votes, search upcoming legislation, and track bill progress. Open States gets their Bill, legislator, committee and event data from official sources, linked at the bottom of each legislator, bill, vote, committee or event page. Check out their methodology for more. They rely primarily on scraping data from sites. Wouldn't it be awesome of all state legislatures had bulk data feeds so that 1000 sites like Open States could bloom? Join the Webinar on February 22nd to learn more about Open States.

After more than four years of work from volunteers and a full-time team here at Sunlight we're immensely proud to launch the full Open States site with searchable legislative data for all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Open States is the only comprehensive database of activities from all state capitols that makes it easy to find your state lawmaker, review their votes, search for legislation, track bills and much more.

If you're interested in your state lawmaker, you'll be able to get notifications for their actions, a map of their district, voting records, committee assignments, campaign finance records from Influence Explorer, local news articles and contact information. If you're curious about a particular piece of legislation, Open States allows you to check on its status, find the sponsors, break down votes, view bill text and all supporting documents. Our powerful search capabilities allow you to find similar topics across states and view overview pages for each state, chamber and committee.

We all know about the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, but did you know there were Code Talkers in World War I? Or that the very first US military code talkers were Choctaw and Comanche?

Suzanne Marshall, an MLIS student at Florida State University and reference librarian at West Florida Public Library serves up these facts and more in an article titled "A hidden story: American Indian Code Talkers" in the Winter 2012 Student Papers Issue of Dttp: Documents to the People.

The story of the Indian Code Talkers and belated efforts to honor their work is a story interesting in and of itself. But Suzanne uses this story and some unanswered questions as a springboard to explain the current state of affairs in government archival material and to argue for facilitated access to such material.

She concludes with:

Citizens rightfully own government documents and must be granted not only access but facilitated access to those documents. Important facts are, by default, invisible and virtually inaccessible without facilitated access. As this case of the American Indian code talkers highlights, we must strive to reveal the rich heritage we share in our co-owned government documents.

We agree.

Reference:

Marshall, Suzanne. A hidden story: American Indian Code Talkers. Dttp: Documents to the People, v. 40, no. 4, Winter 2012, p. 27

This announcement was just posted to the Global Open Access List (GOAL). We think it's a great move forward in offering free access to federally funded research. Infodocket has several other links of interest, including analysis by Peter Suber. If you support FASTR, please tell Congress.

U.S. Representatives Introduce Bill Expanding Access to Federally Funded Research

Click here to read the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act.

From a press release from GPO:

President Obama’s State Of The Union Address Available On Gpo’s Federal Digital System

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) makes President Barack Obama's State of the Union address available on GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys). The public can access the President’s address in the Congressional Record, which is the official publication of the U.S. Congress.

Direct link to address: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-2013-02-12/html/CREC-2013-02-12-pt1-Pg...

Carl Malamud posted the following to BoingBoing today:

Assemblyman Brian Nestande of California has introduced Assembly Bill 292, which would open source the California Code of Regulations (including the Building Codes!!). The summary reads:

"This bill would provide that the full text of the California Code of Regulations shall bear an open access creative commons attribution license, allowing any individual, at no cost, to use, distribute, and create derivative works based on the material for either commercial or noncommercial purposes."

Public.Resource.Org has bulk data for the CCR and the public safety codes (known as Title 24) online, but this would all be way easier if we didn't have to double-key the building codes every 3 years and jump on the West CD-ROM every 2 months to extract the data. This move would lead to tremendous innovation, just like we've seen when the Federal Register went open source in bulk.

The bill sponsor, Assemblyman Nestande, has a long background in public policy and IP. He was campaign manager for Sonny Bono's successful 1994 congressional campaign.

[HT BoingBoing!]

The Obama Administration has launched the Smart Disclosure Data Community at Consumer.Data.gov.

• Consumer.Data.gov.

  This site is a centralized federal resource for Smart Disclosure. Here you will find hundreds of government datasets that can help enable consumer choice; apps that demonstrate the power of Smart Disclosure; challenges for app developers; and resources to learn more about Smart Disclosure.

• Consumer.Data.Gov is Live!, by Sophie Raseman and Nick Sinai, whitehouse.gov (February 11, 2013).

  The Community announced today is a first-of-its-kind centralized platform containing over 400 smart disclosure data sets and resources from dozens of agencies across government. Using the Community, entrepreneurs and innovators can access free Federal data to create the consumer applications, products, and services of the future -- all in one convenient location.

Some of you may remember Dr. Joel Weintraub's census talk at the 2012 ALA Annual conference in Anaheim, CA -- complete w a fire alarm and sobbing librarians. Because of that immensely interesting talk, My colleague Kris Kasianovitz and I decided to invite Dr Weintraub to speak about the history of the US census at Stanford University. He came last week (Monday 2/4/13) and gave an amazingly informative talk on the United States Decennial Census Manuscripts aka Enumerators' Notebooks, the history of the Census Questions, including controversial questions, undercounts, and truthfulness. For more on Dr Weintraub's census work see his 1940 census site and his collaborative work with Steve Morse.

The talk was co-sponsored by Stanford University Library, SUL Government Information Librarians and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS).

Enjoy!

Dr Joel Weintraub: Unique Aspects of the United States Census from James Jacobs

The Government Printing Office has joined the social networking site Pinterest that "lets you organize and share all the beautiful things."

• pinterest.com/usgpo/.

The GPO press release says:

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) expands its social media presence by joining Pinterest. Connecting people through 'things' they find interesting is the founding principle of Pinterest and a natural fit with GPO's core mission of Keeping America Informed on the three branches of the Federal Government. GPO will use Pinterest to share historic photos, videos, products, and Government publications with the public. Pinterest joins GPO's other social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Government Book Talk blog.

Link to GPO's Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/usgpo/

"GPO is constantly evolving and keeping up-to-date on public trends and the popular ways to access and share information," said Acting Public Printer Davita Vance-Cooks. "GPO's expansion of social media supports our mission of Keeping America Informed. Joining Pinterest is one more way GPO can engage the public and continue to serve as the official link between the Federal Government and public."

This was a mostly quiet week at the State Agency Databases Project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. Quiet enough that I would not normally put out an activity report, but there are two notable things I wanted to share with you.

ORPHANS - THE FINAL FOUR?

The adoption of Florida is pending. That leaves us with just four states waiting for volunteer government information specialists/enthusiasts to adopt them:

• Hawaii
• Kansas
• Minnesota
• Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting.

CALIFORNIA'S DATABASE FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS

As most government information specialists are aware, local government documents are probably the most elusive of all. California has taken a step to try to make their local government documents easier to find and use. I (and any other user of the State Agency Databases wiki) was made aware of this by Joel Rane, the volunteer for California. Here is his annotation of California's new resource:

California Local Government Documents - An extensive database of local government documents across the state; if a document is not online, a scanned copy is hosted by the Berkeley IGS. Includes access to local municipal codes and charters, searchable by city; documents related to land use and development issues, searchable by jurisdiction, type of planning document and year (at both county and city level); and budgets and financial reports for Bay Area cities, county budgets and annual financial reports, and annual reports from county grand juries, all searchable by keyword. A tremendous resource.

Hats off to UC Berkeley for putting this together and thanks to Joel Rane for making the rest of us aware of this new resource for one state's local documents.

Some of you may remember that we nominated Aaron Swartz for the ALA Madison award a few weeks ago and asked folks to write in letters of support to the Washington Office. Last week, there was a memorial for Aaron in Washington DC -- Rick Perlstein covered it well for The Nation, "Aaron Swartz's DC Memorial: Radical Brings Bipartisanship to Washington". Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, the 2012 Madison award honoree(!) and one of a number of Congressional members who attended Aaron's memorial, caught wind of the campaign to nominate Aaron for the Madison Award and sent in her own letter in support. She kindly allowed us to post the letter here.

Zoe Lofgren letter to ALA nominating Aaron Swartz for the Madison award from James Jacobs

Gregorio Sablan (D), rep of the Northern Mariana Islands has introduced into the House H.R.429, Northern Mariana Islands Federal Depository Library Act of 2013 which would amend Section 1905 of title 44 to permit the Delegate from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands to designate Federal depository libraries.

The National Academy Of Public Administration has released its report on the Government Printing Office.

• Rebooting The Government Printing Office: Keeping America Informed in the Digital Age, A Report by a Panel of the National Academy Of Public Administration for the U.S. Congress, Congressional Research Service, and the Government Printing Office. National Academy Of Public Administration, Washington, DC (January 2013).

  Congress mandated that the National Academy of Public Administration (the Academy) conduct a broad operational review of GPO. The Academy formed a five-member Panel of Fellows to conduct a ten-month study of the agency’s current role, its operations, and its future direction.

The report contains 27 finding and 15 recommendations. Depository libraries will be particularly interested in three findings:

• III-3: Preservation of the Legacy (Tangible) Government Collection
• III-4: Preservation of the Digital Government Collection
• III-5: Government Information Dissemination and Access

The report repeats many of the tropes about the digital government information that have become familiar over the years. Some of these bear repeating and others are more questionable.

Perhaps the most troubling suggestion in the report is GPO should consider "cost recovery" for access to FDsys:

Now may be the time for GPO to revisit charging the public for access to FDsys content. The Academy convened a forum of experts on printing and publishing where this topic was discussed extensively. Participants noted that technologies for online payments have progressed to the point that they cost very little to administer. Also, the public is becoming accustomed to paying fees for government services that used to be free (such as admittance to National Parks). Rather than charge a publication price, GPO could explore charging a small user fee to recoup the cost of providing access to government information on FDsys, or allowing users to view documents for free, and charging for document downloads. Forum participants also discussed the possibility of GPO exploring opportunities for repackaging files and content in different ways and making them available for sale to the public.

This model (as the report notes) was tried before with GPO Access and failed. We would argue that it failed not because the "technologies of online payments" were inadequate at the time, but because attempting to charge fees for information that was also available without fees was a fundamentally flawed approach. (We have written about this issue many times. See for example: Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program and Privatization of GPO, Defunding of FDsys, and the Future of the FDLP.)

There is much more in the report and it deserves careful scrutiny.

Access to Court Opinions Expands. Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (January 31, 2013).

A pilot project giving the public free, text-searchable, online-access to court opinions now is available to all federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts.

The Judicial Conference, the policy-making body of the Federal court system, approved national implementation of the project with the Government Printing Office, Federal Digital System (FDsys), which provides free access to publications from all three branches of federal government via the Internet. The pilot project pulls opinions nightly from courts’ Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) systems and sends them to the GPO, where they are processed and posted on the FDsys website. The functionality to transfer opinions to FDsys is included in the latest release of CM/ECF which is now available to all courts. Twenty-nine courts participated in the original pilot, and now, all courts may opt to participate in the program.

Access to judicial opinions through FDsys allows the Judiciary to make its work more easily available to the public. Collections are divided into appellate, district or bankruptcy court opinions and are text-searchable across opinions and across courts. FDsys also permits embedded animation and audio.

Presently, more than 600,000 opinions dating back to 2004 are available. Opinions from the pilot are already one of the most heavily used collections on FDsys, with millions of retrievals each month.

This week at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases:

NEW VOLUNTEERS AND A STATE HAND-OFF

This week we officially welcome three new volunteers to our project:

• Susan Paterson (University of British Columbia) - District of Columbia
• Siu Min Yu (Rice University) - Maryland
• Flora Shrode (Utah State University) - Utah

Flora is taking over the management of the Utah page from Susanne Caro who recently took over the Montana page.

Susanne had been one of two volunteers with two state pages. I (Daniel Cornwall) am the other. In addition to my home state of Alaska, I also do my best to maintain the Arizona page. If you live in Arizona and would like to take over the page, let me know.

ORPHANS: THE FINAL FIVE

With the successful adoption of Maryland and the District of Columbia, we now have five states up for adoption:

• Florida
• Hawaii
• Kansas
• Minnesota
• Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting.

DATABASE ACTIVITY

For a full listing of activity over the past week, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are some highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

OHIO (Audrey Hall)

Empowerment through Education county highlights] Summary of program activities for each county. Additional keyword searching available.

NEW RESOURCES ON THE "NOT DATABASES" PAGE

The following non-database resources were added to the South Dakota section of our "not databases" page:

• Adoption Resources in South Dakota
• South Dakota Resource Directory for the Elderly

A LOOK AT THE VOLUNTEERS BEHIND THE STATE AGENCY DATABASES PROJECT

We recently surveyed our project volunteers about who they were, where they worked and where they updated their pages from. About 70% of our volunteers responded to the survey. Here are the demographic findings:

What best describes your current job position?

Librarian - 77.8%
Paraprofessional - 8.3%
Library Student - 2.8%
Other (please specify) - 11.1%

Responses from the "other" category included:

Circulation Manager
Assistant Director with background in Government Documents
Library consultant
Archivist with a library degree working in a library

--

What best describes your current workplace?

Academic Library - 63.9%
Special Library - 2.8%
State Library - 33.3%

Other options were offered on the survey, but only the three categories above had non-zero responses.

--

Are you allowed work time to edit your page?

Yes - 88.9%
No - 11.1%

The project coordinator is one of the people whose currrent job description is too far outside the project work to justify using work time to maintain his pages or write these reports. In full disclosure, I have not asked to.

--

Where do you edit your page?

Work - 58.3%
Home - 11.1%
Home and Work - 30.6%

--

Do you live in the state of the page you edit? (If you have more than one state, choose "other" and note which state you live in.)

Yes - 77.1%
No - 17.1%
Other (please specify) - 5.7%

In addition to the demographic questions above, volunteers were asked several narrative questions. We'll be bringing those questions and selected responses to you over the next three weeks.

Steve Schultze, Princeton University, Associate Director at the Center for Information Technology Policy, gave this talk as part of a series of 3-minute lightning talks on transparency hosted on Capitol Hill by the Advisory Committee on Transparency, a project of the Sunlight Foundation.

• My Bill to #OpenPACER in memory of #aaronsw -- Open for Comment and Available on Github, by Steve Schultze. Freedom to Tinker (February 1, 2013). (video and transcript with links and downloadable slides).

  ...the courts offer electronic records through the PACER web site, which charges for search results, docket lists, and documents.

  ...PACER is making a killing, with $120 million dollars in revenue for 2012. Even with a highly inefficient system architecture, they only manage to spend about $20 million dollars on PACER expenses per year. Where does the rest of the money go? They spend it on other stuff.

  This is illegal. In 1992, Congress passed a law saying that the courts could charge only to recoup costs. Ten years later, Congress strengthened that law and said that it expected the courts to move to a free system. PACER fees have increased 42% since then.

  ...Open PACER is a bill that, once and for all, mandates that the courts provide free access to our public record. The bill is open for comment at openpacer.org. It is written in GPO-compliant Legislative XML, which anyone can edit and submit for incorporation via a tool called github.

The "workaround" is to clear your browser's cache, cookies, and history. The Census Bureau also suggests viewing the site in either Internet Explorer 9 or 8. The Bureau and its contractor should be really, really embarrassed about this and fix it quickly.

• Workaround Solution for Redesigned American Factfinder Browser Issues. FDLP Desktop (31 January 2013).

  The U.S. Census Bureau has brought to our attention that the newly redesigned American FactFinder does not render properly in some Web browsers. Users have reported issues with various versions of Mozilla Firefox (FF) and Internet Explorer (IE).

  The Census Bureau is investigating the matter. In the meantime, their recommendation is to clear the browser's cache, cookies, and history as a temporary solution. In addition, they recommend viewing the site in either IE 9 or 8. If issues are encountered, the following instructions are specific to IE 8 and up.

  1. Click on the "Tools" icon.
  2. Select "Internet Options".
  3. Under the "General" tab, click on the "Delete" button under "Browsing history".
  4. Select the following:
     • Temporary Internet files
     • Cookies
     • History
  5. Deselect:
     • "Preserve Favorites website data"
  6. Click on the "Delete" button.

  To clear the browser cache, cookies, and history for other browsers, visit the American FactFinder FAQ or check the browser's Web site for browser-specific instructions.

  Be advised that clearing your browser's cache, cookies, and history may impact saved sessions for other Web services.

   

I just noticed this post over at Wired Magazine's Threat Level blog, Activists Flood Government Agencies With FOIA Requests in Tribute to Aaron Swartz. Last week, Muckrock, the site that helps journalists, lawyers, and the public submit FOIA requests for a small fee ($20 for 5 requests), waived their fees in tribute to the transparency fights of computer programmer and internet activist Aaron Swartz who committed suicide a few weeks ago. I hope Muckrock will post all of the documents received via these requests. According to Muckrock:

MuckRock has begun processing 153 free FOIA requests submitted in honor of Internet pioneer and transparency activist Aaron Swartz, who died earlier this month at age 26.

Updates on the requests will be available at the File for Aaron profile page. Swartz’s own requests can be found here.

I'm really glad Muckrock is doing this, and also happy to see that they post all requests and FOIA'd documents on their site. I've added Muckrock to our Archive-it FOIA collection.

I'm not sure how long this has been going on, but in trying to retrieve a report from the Education Resources Information Clearinghouse (ERIC), I received this "error" message:

Dear ERIC Community,

We have currently disabled access to many ERIC full-text PDFs due to the discovery of personally identifiable information in some documents. A team is in place to check each PDF to see if it contains personally identifiable information. Due to the quality of many of the documents, a large portion of the search has to be done by hand. This will take several weeks, but our primary concern is to protect the privacy of individuals.

To minimize the burden on our users, we will prioritize searching the PDFs that users request. If you would like to request a PDF to be returned online, please fill out this form, which requires only the document’s ERIC record number and your email address. Full-text PDFs will be returned on a rolling basis. We will be posting the list of newly released documents here.

We are sorry for the inconvenience and want to thank you for bearing with us through this unexpected delay.

The ERIC Team

It seems like a responsible enough message and they are trying to assist researchers who need documents. It would have been nice if the message had a date stamp so we could see how long it will take ERIC to rectify this situation.

I'm also wondering about the status of ERIC fiche collections. Wonder if we'll see withdrawal requests from ERIC and whether that would wind up highlighting the personal information they're trying to withdraw.