Why Is It So Hard to Get Documents from the National Archives About the National Archives?

While researching my book on the history of presidential libraries, I discovered a shocking but perhaps not surprising situation: the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is improperly withholding its own records. Theoretically a non-partisan as well as non-political agency, NARA is at the center of some of the most controversial issues of our time, including government secrecy, executive privilege, and timely access to presidential records. Rather than abide by legislative requirements and professional standards, NARA has chosen to avoid accessioning and processing many (if not most) of its own records dating back more than forty years. Worse, officials have blocked access to the records, perhaps due to concerns over possible criticism of the agency.

Source: History News Network

Hat tip: Free Government Information blog

Direct to issue 9.2

Articles include:

+ Employee Development Using WebCT Vista

+ Introducing Learning Commons Functionality into a Traditional Reference Setting

+ Tallying the Chad Marks in the Ballot Box: A Survey of Distance Learning Library Services in Florida’s State Universities

+ Library 2.0 and the Problem of Hate Speech

From the article:

The Getty Conservation Institute helped create a Middle East online database for antiquities to help inventory, monitor and manage archaeological sites and monuments in the region.

Source: NY Times

From the news release:

From 10,000-year-old American Indian tools and weapons to 20th century African masks, more than 26,000 artifacts in the Wake Forest University Museum of Anthropology’s collections will be accessible online in a searchable database.

Beginning Sept. 9, the public will be able to search the online database, www.wfu.edu/moa/database, and find a photograph and description of each object, including information about where it was collected.

From the SEL article by Chris Sherman:

Google, in partnership with a number of North American newspapers, ProQuest and Heritage, has begun digitizing printed newspapers, making them both searchable and browsable exactly as they appeared in print, including photographs, headlines, articles and advertisements.

More from the official Google blog post.

See Also: Chronicling America Newspaper Digitization from LC

See Also: FREE Special Collections of Historic Newspapers from NewspaperArchive.com
(Some of the free content here is available for a fee elsewhere).

Articles include:
-Announcement of the End-of-Term Web site capture project
-Information about JHOVE and JHOVE2
-Invitation to participate in a Mass Storage meeting in Maryland

Source: Library of Congress

Direct to the report.

Source: DCMI

Extremely Fast Text Feature Extraction for Classification and Indexing

Most research in speeding up text mining involves algorithmic improvements to induction algorithms, and yet for many large scale applications, such as classifying or indexing large document repositories, the time spent extracting word features from texts can itself greatly exceed the initial training time. This paper describes a fast method for text feature extraction that folds together Unicode conversion, forced lowercasing, word boundary detection, and string hash computation. We show empirically that our integer hash features result in classifiers with equivalent statistical performance to those built using string word features, but require far less computation and less memory.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 348 KB)

Source: HP Labs

From the news release:

A 2008 National Leadership Demonstration Grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) will enable Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh to digitally preserve more than 400,000 pages of historic materials related to the iron and steel industry and make them available to the public. The $600,000 grant, awarded today by IMLS director Dr. Anne-Imelda M. Radice, will finance “The Legacy of Iron and Steel” project.”

Barbara Quint writes:

Regardless of who wins this November’s presidential election, the business of government still chugs along. Or does it? With so much of the daily activity of the federal government now conducted on the web, the effect of a change of administration becomes a matter of curiosity or even anxiety. In 2001 and 2004, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA; www.archives.gov) created a “snapshot” crawl of federal agency websites (109th Congress and 2004 presidential term available at www.webharvest.gov). However, in March, NARA announced it would not conduct the same kind of snapshot for 2008/2009. Responding to the possible loss of an historically important record, five agencies and organizations– the Library of Congress (LC; www.loc.gov), Internet Archive (www.archive.org), California Digital Library (www.cdlib.org), University of North Texas Libraries (www.library.unt.edu), and the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO; www.gpo.gov) –have partnered to take on the task.

Source: InfoToday NewsBreaks

From the news release:

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the “The International Survey of Library & Museum Digitization Projects” report to their offering.

The study presents data from more than 100 library and museum digitization programs from academic, public and special libraries in the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, the UK and other countries. The mean annual budget for the digitization projects that contributed to the sample was $122,408, with a range from $0 to $1.963 million. The reports presents data on sources of funding, the outlook for raising money for additional projects, collaboration within and outside of institutions, staffing of digitization projects, spending on hardware and software, practices on rights, permissions and copyright clearance, outsourcing, staff training, impact of digitization on preservation mediums, cataloging issues, marketing of digitization projects and other aspects of library and museum digitization project management. Data is broken out by size and type of digitization project and by size and type of institution. Data is presented separately for text, photograph, audio, and film/video intensive projects.

Just of few of the report’s many findings are that:

- More than 60% of the funding for the projects in the sample is derived from the library budget itself. For U.S. libraries, close to 64% of funds for digitization projects comes from the library budget.

- A shade more than 20% of the organizations in the sample believe that the outlook for raising money for digitization projects from outside sources is not favorable, while more than 43% characterize it as ‘not too bad,’ more than 32% call it ‘pretty good’ and more than 4% characterize it as excellent.

- More than 53% of the organizations in the sample have teamed up with another department or faculty of the organization to work jointly on a digitization project.
(more…)

From the post:

The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment has created a digital repository of the publications of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. This collection includes proceedings and papers dating back to 1901, from the records of the Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. This collection is now available on the UC Berkeley Library Web site, and also in the California Digital Library’s Calisphere and Online Archive of California (OAC).

Source: IWS Documented News Service

The digital LBJ: Library archivists give new voice to Lyndon Johnson’s calls

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lyndon Johnson, whose presidency spanned one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history since the Civil War.

It began with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, saw the passage of two historic civil rights laws, included the massive buildup of the war in Vietnam that eventually soured his presidency, struggled through the social unrest of the civil rights and antiwar movements, and faded with the assassinations of Sen. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

During those times, Johnson recorded hundreds of hours of phone calls with national leaders, political honchos, friends, confidants and ordinary citizens, which the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum is preserving, restoring and making available to the public. These recordings contain the raw and largely unedited conversations of a larger-than-life politician known for his colorful language and the force of personality he used to influence political allies and adversaries.

The library, located on the University of Texas campus in Austin, has released recordings made through April 1968.

“We’ve been working on this since 1993,” when the first recordings were released, said senior archivist Regina Greenwell. “We hope to release the rest of them, through early 1969, by the end of this year,” said supervisory archivist Claudia Anderson.

See also: Audio preservation: Balancing the new with the tried and true
See also: Lost in transcription
Source: Government Computer News

Articles in this issue include:

+ Versioning in Repositories: Implementing Best Practice
Jenny Brace explains why giving time to versioning within a repository is worthwhile and outlines the best practice to implement.

+ New Schemas for Mapping Pedagogies and Technologies
Gráinne Conole reflects on the implications of Web 2.0 for education and offers two new schemas for thinking about harnessing the potential of technologies.

+ Integrating Journal Back Files into an Existing Electronic Environment
Jason Cooper describes how Loughborough University Library integrated a number of collections of journal back files into their existing electronic environment.

+ The Networked Library Service Layer: Sharing Data for More Effective Management and Cooperation
Janifer Gatenby identifies criteria for determining which data in various library systems could be more beneficially shared and managed at a network level.

+ A Desk Too Far?: The Case for Remote Working
Marieke Guy examines both the benefits and the pitfalls of working remotely from the standpoint of both employees and their organisation.

+ Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload
Sarah Houghton-Jan explores different strategies for managing and coping with various types of informational overload.

+ Lost in the JISC Information Environment
Tony Ross gives a personal reflection on his intellectual struggle to comprehend the JISC Information Environment.

+ Search Engines: Google Still Growing
Phil Bradley finds it difficult to ignore some of the latest developments from Google - particularly the ones that are actually quite good.

+ Persistent Identifiers: Considering the Options
Emma Tonkin looks at the current landscape of persistent identifiers, describes several current services, and examines the theoretical background behind their structure and use.

From the article:

The National Archives will start copying and making available online all central government website content from November.

Source: Kable’s Government Computing