From the introduction:

With this site, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), in co-operation with the Canada Gazette Directorate, Public Works and Government of Services Canada, will make the Gazette available online, in its entirety, for the first time.

Current issues of the Canada Gazette have been available to Canadians at most libraries and through subscription, and the Canada Gazette Directorate has a searchable database on its website of all issues since 1998 (http://canadagazette.gc.ca/index-e.html). However, an online database that includes all issues of the Canada Gazette dating back to 1841 and searchable by keyword is a major achievement that allows even greater access to this very important resource.

The database comprises images taken from microfilm, microfiche and rare original copies of the Gazette held by LAC. The digitization of this material, which began in 2007, is still underway. By the end of 2008, visitors to this site will be able to access all issues of the Canada Gazette, from its beginning in 1841 until 1998. For those issues currently available on this site, please go to Search the Canada Gazette.

Source: Library and Archives Canada

Direct to FRD’s 20 page, PDF file.

See Also: Links to All FRD Country Profiles

+ China Earthquake
Situation Map (5/12/2008)

+ Eastern Sichuan, China: Estimated Population Esposed to Earthquake Shaking (as of 12 May 2008) (PDF, 1062 Kb)

+ Eastern Sichuan, China: Earthquake Locations (as of 12 May 2008) (PDF, 148 Kb)

+ Cyclone Nargis Floods Burma (Myanmar) (as of 05 May 2008)

+ Myanmar: Cyclone Nargis - Who/What/Where, Protection Sector (as of 12 May 2008) (PDF, 94 Kb)

+ Myanmar: Tropical Cyclone Nargis (as of 11 May 2008) - Situation Map (PDF, 1272 Kb)

+ More Myanmar Maps and News ||| More China Maps and News

Source: Reliefweb and Other Sources

The effects of mercury on human health are a common concern. The new NLM Enviro-Health Links page, “Mercury and Human Health ,” includes links to sites about mercury reduction, occupational exposure, compact fluorescent light bulbs, mercury in health care, regulations and state legislation, and preformed TOXLINE and MEDLINE/PubMed searches.

Direct to the site: http://sis.nlm.nih.gov/enviro/mercury.html

NLM also offers other Enviro-Health Links on topics such as:

+ Children’s Environmental Health
+ Indoor Air Pollution
+ Keeping the Artist Safe: Hazards of Arts and Crafts Materials
+ Outdoor Air Pollution
+ Lead
+ Arsenic

Source: National Library of Medicine

+++ Direct to Database

+++ From the news release:

Our database covers from 1999 to the present. In that time, more than 450 gifts in all were reported having been received by congressmen and their aides by foreign governments. These gifts include tangible ones, such as a ceremonial sword, or travel, such as a ride in a military helicopter. Only gifts above what the law has determined to be “minimal value” is considered reportable. The Senate defines “minimal value” as $100, while the House and executive branch adjust the value by inflation. In 2008, the value for the House and executive branch was $335.

Source: LegiStorm (via Basefsky’s IWS Documented News Service)

From the site and timeline:

This interactive timeline features some of the significant institutional and legislative milestones important to both House practice and procedure, as well as U.S. history itself.

Source: Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives

Resource of the Week — StateScape
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

Right off the bat, you need to know that StateScape is a fee-based service that “serves organizations seeking a competitive edge in government relations by providing the fastest and most accurate legislative and regulatory information and analysis service on the market.” But I found a lot of nifty free stuff here that should be quite useful to me in my day job — and you might like to know about it as well.

First of all, the site offers free access to its BillFinder search engine, which allows you to find any state or federal bill by keywords or bill numbers. After filling out a brief registration form, you are taken to a search page that allows you to select a particular state from a menu or search across all 50 states at once. A checkbox allows you to limit your search to “Approved/Enacted Only” bills. In the results list, you can look at the full text of each bill or a summary.

Additionally, StateScape’s Resources page offers a variety of free state-level legislative info:

• Legislature Links: Links to state legislature home pages, bill lookup pages, and member lists for each chamber.
• Session Schedules: Gives start and end dates for regular sessions and special sessions. Indicates which states carry over bills from one year to the next.
• Legislative Control: Indicates the number of legislators from each party by chamber.
• Governors: Who are they? How long are their terms?
• Governor Signing Deadlines: How long does a Governor have to sign legislation?
• Legislative Process: How does a bill become a law?
• Budget Timetable: What’s the budget schedule in each state?
• Effective Dates: When does newly signed legislation become law?
• Meeting Dates: Which state public policy groups are meeting?
• Newspapers: Links to selected state newspapers.

StateScape encourages you to let them know about other state-level information resources you find useful so they can consider including these. Some that we like:

+ Stateline.org — Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and staffed by professional journalists, this constantly updated site offers “timely tips and research material on state policy innovations and trends,” and has individual RSS feeds for each state and policy issue.

+ National Conference of State Legislatures — “(A) bipartisan organization that serves the legislators and staffs of the nation’s 50 states.” It provides information on policy issues, a monthly magazine, and a variety of other publications and reports, including the occasional freebie.

+ USA.gov offers a collection of links to each state’s official home page, U.S. territories and outlying agencies are represented as well. The Library of Congress provides a similar resource.

+ State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States — An ALA Government Documents Round Table-backed wiki that is an ongoing effort to “pull together all publicly accessible state agency databases” in one handy location. This particular site was chosen as a Resource of the Week last August. Various databases from the collection are highlighted in an ongoing blog, and there’s even a fan page on Facebook.

+ The University of Michigan Library Documents Center, one of our favorite fishing holes, has an excellent State Government and Politics section offering a comprehensive list of annotated links to many, many sources of state-level government information. (Note that some resources here are print publications or subscription-based databases restricted to the university community, but you may have access through your local library or workplace.)

Finally, on a semi-related note…just because it’s spring… The Native Plant Information Network (via the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at the University of Texas) provides you with a list of recommended native plants for each state. Use the interactive map or the dropdown menu.

Direct to FRD’s 230 page, PDF file.

See Also: Links to All FRD Country Profiles

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

Archive-It, a subscription service of the Internet Archive, that creates and maintains permanent (and keyword searchable) archives of web content for clients has just passed the 500 collection mark*. Congrats to the A-I team. Unlike The Wayback Machine, Archive-It collections can be searched by keyword.

The two newest collections:
+ Moldovan websites (via Georgetown University)

This collection of Moldovan websites includes information about nongovernmental organizations and issues relevant to Moldova today.

+ Lao PDR Government and NGO Websites (via National Library of Australia)

Selected Lao PDR government and NGO web sites archived from 2008.

* That’s nearly 400 million URLs.

From the post:

The federal government has expanded its Nursing Home Compare Web site to include a searchable database on facilities that received low-quality scores in state inspections. Meanwhile, the Senate is considering legislation that would require the disclosure of more nursing home quality information. The measure could be included in a Medicare bill.

Source: iHealth Beat

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

Direct to FRD’s 24 page, PDF file.

See Also: Links to All FRD Country Profiles

From the introduction:

The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of Jewish Americans who have helped form the fabric of American history, culture and society.

Direct to Web Site

Jewish Heritage Month takes place in May.

Source: LC, NARA, NEH, NGA, SI, USHMM

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