UNESCO popular documents

The UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) library catalogue UNESDOC has a feature to display the most popular items in a week: Top ten of the week, most consulted documents of last 8 days. This week, the list includes a report entitled, “Towards information literacy indicators” (full text, pdf, 337 KB).

Source: UN Pulse

The 2007 ALA list is now available.

For a second consecutive year, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s award-winning “And Tango Makes Three,” a children’s book about two male penguins caring for an orphaned egg, tops the list of American Library Association’s (ALA) 10 Most Challenged Books of 2007.

Three books are new to the list “Olive’s Ocean,” by Kevin Henkes; “The Golden Compass,” by Philip Pullman; and “TTYL,” by Lauren Myracle.

“Free access to information is a core American value that should be protected,” said Judith F. Krug, director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom. “Not every book is right for each reader, but an individual’s interpretation of a book should not take away my right to select reading materials for my family or myself.”

Source: ALA

From the summary:

Without a warrant or subpoena, the FBI seeks records from the Internet Archive about one of its patrons, citing national security. But when the EFF and the ACLU intervene, a federal court sends the G-men packing.

Source: Wired News

From the article:

The federal Conservatives have quietly killed an access to information registry used by journalists, experts and the public that users say helped hold the government accountable.

The Coordination of Access to Information Requests System, or CAIRS, is an electronic list of nearly every access to information request filed to federal departments and agencies.

Originally created in 1989, it was used as an internal tool to keep track of requests and co-ordinate the government’s response between agencies to potentially sensitive information released.

Now, users mine the database to do statistical studies, fine tune phrasing on new requests and discover obscure documents — often using the information against the government.

“It was really a tool designed to make government more open,” said CBC investigative journalist David McKie.

Source: Canadian Broadcasting Centre

From the news release:

The number of intercepted wire, oral or electronic communications — also known as wiretaps — authorized by federal and state courts in 2007 was 20 percent higher than in 2006. Courts issued 2,208 such orders in 2007, compared to 1,839 in 2006, according to The 2007 Wiretap Report.

Source: U.S. Courts

A Precious Resource At Risk

Farmers are a self-sufficient lot, but they don’t get very far without centuries of knowledge behind them. If you don’t learn the trade at Daddy’s knee, you have to learn it somewhere, and as the number of farmers in the United States has dwindled, so have the troops of agriculture extension agents who once advised them.

One thing we do still have is the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, signed into being by Abraham Lincoln in 1862. It is the greatest agricultural library in the world. Through its document delivery system, its vast collections have long been available to other libraries all over the country and around the globe. It is the hub. And in no small way, it has helped build the farm my husband has tended for the past 30 years. His file cabinets bulge with material gleaned through AFSIC, the library’s Alternative Farming Systems Information Center.

Another presidential pen may soon bring this buzzing network of information flow to an abrupt standstill. Flat-lined for years, the National Agricultural Library’s budget is slated for drastic cuts in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. The cuts could end the acquisition of new printed works, endanger the preservation of its special collections, halt document delivery and turn a national library into a local one. Unless Congress votes to restore the money, a farmer or researcher will soon have to travel to Beltsville to investigate a new soil amendment, study an old crop rotation scheme or gauge the progress of an invading weed.

Source: Washington Post

Word from the UK’s Publishing Tech (parent of Ingenta) that they are working with BBC Monitoring to launch a new web site and database. Free trials are available for academic libraries around the globe.
From an e-mail received on Wednesday:

It’s a comprehensive source of global current affairs content (it collates content from over 3000 sources in 150 countries) and the web platform has been specifically designed to meet the needs of the academic/institutional market. Our PCG divison is selling the new service and is currently offering free trials to academic libraries - they just need to contact bbcmonitoringlibrary@pcgplus.com to sign up.

To learn more about the new BBC Monitoring service for academic libraries, check this news release.

Law library users now find themselves barred

Eastern West Virginians in need of valuable legal resources and research assistance literally have been locked out of a publicly funded regional law library for more than a year, according to the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals’ top librarian.

“Since we are without a librarian at the moment, I am reluctant to leave the library open,” Kaye L. Maerz said Thursday at the library in the Berkeley County Judicial Center in Martinsburg.

Maerz could not explain why the high court last year stopped her effort to fill the full-time position, which has been vacant since January 2007, when former librarian Deborah Hillyard resigned to work for federal Magistrate Judge David J. Joel.
…
The extended vacancy has alarmed Maerz and 23rd Judicial Circuit Judge David H. Sanders, who said last week that they were concerned that county leaders might decide to use the space for something else.

“There have been lawyers that have been frustrated by it not being available,” Sanders said.

Sanders said there are a number of attorneys who cannot readily afford the cost of purchasing volumes of reference books that are available at the library. The volumes include South Eastern Reporter, which contain West Virginia case law. Each volume costs $170, and there are several full bookshelves of the reference series, which include editorial explanation to help a layperson understand legal terminology, Maerz said.

Source: The Herald-Mail

From the article:

Organisations should cut their stores of personal information to lessen the job of protecting it, according to Richard Thomas.

Source: Kable’s Government Computing

Federal Records: Agencies Face Challenges in Managing E-Mail
From Highlights (PDF: 71 KB):

E-mail, because of its nature, presents challenges to records management. First, the information contained in e-mail records is not uniform: it may concern any subject or function and document various types of transactions. As a result, in many cases, decisions on which e-mail messages are records must be made individually. Second, the transmission data associated with an e-mail record—including information about the senders and receivers of messages, the date and time the message was sent, and any attachments to the messages—may be crucial to understanding the context of the record. Third, a given message may be part of an exchange of messages between two or more people within or outside an agency, or even of a string (sometimes branching) of many messages sent and received on a given topic. In such cases, agency staff need to decide which message or messages should be considered records and who is responsible for storing them in a recordkeeping system. Finally, the large number of federal e-mail users and high volume of e-mails increase the management challenge.

Preliminary results of GAO’s ongoing review of e-mail records management at four agencies show that not all are meeting the challenges posed by e-mail records. Although the four agencies’ e-mail records management policies addressed, with a few exceptions, the regulatory requirements, these requirements were not always met for the senior officials whose e-mail practices were reviewed. Each of the four agencies generally followed a print and file process to preserve e-mail records in paper-based recordkeeping systems, but for about half of the senior officials, e-mail records were not being appropriately identified and preserved in such systems. Instead, e-mail messages were being retained in e-mail systems that lacked recordkeeping capabilities. (Among other things, a recordkeeping system allows related records to be grouped into classifications according to their business purposes.) Unless they have recordkeeping capabilities, e-mail systems may not permit easy and timely retrieval of groupings of related records or individual records. Further, keeping large numbers of record and nonrecord messages in e-mail systems potentially increases the time and effort needed to search for information in response to a business need or an outside inquiry, such as a Freedom of Information Act request. Factors contributing to this practice were the lack of adequate staff support and the volume of e-mail received. In addition, agencies had not ensured that officials and their responsible staff received training in recordkeeping requirements for e-mail. If recordkeeping requirements are not followed, agencies cannot be assured that records, including information essential to protecting the rights of individuals and the federal government, is being adequately identified and preserved.

+ Full Report (PDF; 275 KB)

Testimony by Linda Koontz, director, information management issues, before the Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

Source: Government Accountability Office

From the article:

A digital treasure trove of information is out there for the taking, but only if students have a means of discovering the way to find it - a search engine that is both academic and user-friendly.

Scores of academic search engines provide a heavyweight alternative to the commercial ones and work against what Brighton University’s professor of media- Tara Brabazon has termed “the Google effect” - a tendency towards mediocrity.

Source: EducationGuardian.co.uk

Today is World Book and Copyright Day!!!
Let’s Celebrate!!!

Source: UNESCO

From the announcement:

The National Archives and Records Administration announced today (4/17) that it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) describing the procedures and conditions that govern the treatment of CIA records once they are transferred
to NARA’s legal custody. This agreement sets the stage for the transfer of the CIA’s permanent Federal records to the National Archives.

Source: NARA

From the article:

With stories surfacing on news channels regularly about lost or stolen data or the ability to recover data from discarded or resold computers and their hard drives, Computerworld decided to look at some cheap methods of removing that sensitive data from your hard drive permanently. And, what better place to look than YouTube?

Source: Computerworld

How Anonymous Are You?

You may think that you are anonymous as you browse web sites, but pieces of information about you are always left behind. You can reduce the amount of information revealed about you by visiting legitimate sites, checking privacy policies, and minimizing the amount of personal information you provide.

Source: U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team