LISNews: Librarian News

In a blog post on Wednesday, Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs, discussed the “data flood” coming out of Washington and the need for more applications to deal with the new era of government information.

Sunlight Labs is part of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization with a goal of digitizing government data and building Web sites to help make the current data deluge more manageable. The foundation hopes to help solve some of these data overload problems with new tools, including a Web site they are currently testing: nationaldatacatalog.com. It will organize government data sets and try to give more context to this information.

Full story at the NYT Bits Blog

Many More Government Records Compromised in 2009 than Year Ago, Report Claims
If you're bummed about the data in your department that just got breached, you have some cold comfort. Although the combined number of reported data breaches in the government and the military has dropped in 2009 compared to last year, many more records were compromised in those breaches, according to recent figures compiled by a California nonprofit.

Sharing a sense of history
Ferriero is first librarian in charge at National Archives. "It's an awesome responsibility," he said in the echoing rotunda of the building. "It's a stewardship kind of responsibility -- a long-term commitment by the U.S. government to ensure that these documents are available in perpetuity and available to the American public. "

In 1989, The National Security Archive requested documents from the CIA regarding the Iran-Contra affair. This year, the CIA released them. President Barack Obama promised a new era of transparency and adherence to the Freedom of Information Act, but has he followed through? Yvette Chin, FOIA coordinator for the NSA, tells the story behind the long, long wait for information.