LISNews: Librarian News

I rarely, if ever, get to write about government documents. This is one of those times.

I intended to have a reading of the President's proclamation for Patriot Day (that is to say, 9-11) for release via the podcast feed. In the past the White House of Bush The Younger had such proclamations released in the Federal Register before the day of the holiday with the exception of 2004-2006. The press office did release the 2004 text before the holiday, though, as can be seen here. For President Obama's first Patriot Day proclamation, I can only find such this morning in the Federal Register although the website was found to have such after one heckuva non-obvious route searching.

Even though the Federal Register is in fact the official source for proclamations, sometimes the White House web site is a useful unofficial source. Unfortunately that is not the case in this instance. There is a page for proclamations and executive orders but as I write it has not been updated since June 23, 2009.

The Office of the Federal Register is helpful in providing time stamps for when documents are filed. Typically in the text-only view online such is found at the end of the file. The past few years of proclamations, for your reading enjoyment, include:

Obama 2009
Bush 2008
Bush 2007
Bush 2006
Bush 2005
Bush 2004
Bush 2003
Bush 2002

If a proclamation is signed but nobody knows about it, does it really matter?

Tim Walch, director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library-Museum, delivered the following remarks June 17 to Hoover Park staff at a picnic to mark the 75th anniversary of the creation of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Millions of files containing detailed information about U.S. immigrants — including their spouses' names, as well as personal photographs and letters — will soon become available to the public through a federal facility in suburban Kansas City.

Historians and others say the records, called Alien Registration files, or A-files, provide insight on immigrants who arrived in the U.S. after 1944. Long considered temporary files by U.S. immigration officials, the documents could have been destroyed after 75 years.

Full story here.

Story in the New York Times:

When Vivek Kundra became the federal government’s chief information officer, he talked about the value of using standard off-the-shelf computer systems instead of the custom-built ones that government agencies are inclined to buy.

With the new government site Data.gov, Mr. Kundra is showing off the value of standard data formats as well.

The government, of course, has been publishing information on paper for centuries, and in electronic form for decades. The USA.gov portal has links to hundreds of Web sites the government runs about all of its agencies and programs.

But Data.gov is different. It is primarily for machines, not people, at least as a first step. It is a catalog of various sets of data from government agencies.

Full story here.