Archives for June 2006

This appeared on Eric Alterman’s  blog at MSNBC today. I am reproducing it here it in its entirety:

Mr. Alterman:
I have been
reading media and legal materials (including your piece, “Think Again:
Signing the Constitution Away,” at the Center for American Progress), here,
about the unitary executive and the Bush administration’s use of
presidential signing statements.  I think this is an important topic.

Therefore,
I have collected all presidential signing statements from January 19,
2001, through June 12, 2006, and posted a temporary webpage that
provides full text of all the bill signing statements issued by
President George W. Bush.  By setting out the full text of the signing
statements, this Web page should remedy complaints that the statements
are difficult to find.  To help readers verify text, the Web site also
provides links to the full text of the same documents at the White
House and Government Printing Office (GPO) Web sites.

The Web site also provides links to the full text of the laws that are the subject of signing statements.

I
am contacting law schools, scholars, attorneys, and commentators,
hoping to find a permanent home for this Web page.  Please feel free to
pass the URLs to others who may be interested in either: (1) giving
this information a permanent home on the Web, or (2) using the
information (including stealing and distributing it).

The main URLS are:

• Full Annotated Text of all PSSs
• Full Unannotated Text of All PSSs
• Index to PSSs

I
hope that the Web site will: (1) help scholars and commentators write
intelligently and authoritatively about presidential signing statements
and the unitary executive, and (2) save attorneys a great deal of time
rooting these statements (and the laws to which they apply) out of the
GPO and White House websites.

The site is not pretty, but it is useful.

In sum, I want to give this information to someone else.  My offer is free to any taker.

Thank
you for your time.  I enjoyed your article and have linked to it on my
site.  I appreciate your writing well on such an important topic.

—Joyce

The Morgan Library got some very spiffy coverage in the Music section of the NY Times this morning, and that’s extremely cool.  But what was even cooler to me was clicking on my daily dose of LRC and finding this article on online libraries by George Giles. Giles is a libertarian (as are many who post on LRC) so his politics may not be to your liking, but the sites he links to seem quite substantial and cover everything from math to science to the goings on at Oxford and MIT to Marxism (I personally didn’t know there was a Marxists.org but i can’t say I’m surprised.) And I’m heartened to see he listed WebMD and the NIH among his selections. It’s all worth looking at in some detail.

I taught my class on E-Journals this morning at the NYAM Library Open House (and got a great reception from the 10 people who showed up–yea, me!) so I thought I’d devote today’s space to something genuinely nifty if not exactly library-related.

Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log on MSNBC.com is too cool to not be part of any science freak’s daily reading (weekly reading at the least) and since today’s post is all about the Science of Superman, there’s even less reason not to visit today. There are no doubt more hard-core websites on both these subjects (of science and Superman) but this one is eminently accessible and fun to read, which makes it okay in my book.

Meanwhile, I’m bumping up against my deadline for an article on the Academy’s Grey Literature Report, which is one reason I’m posting here so seldom just lately.  My absolute drop dead delivery date is July 10, so I’m hoping to get a real draft complete by June 30. Wish me luck!

This piece by Kate Wittenberg from EPIC at Clumbia U. is definitely worth reading.  It’s titled "Beyond Google, What’s Next for Publishing" and does a fine job of discussing how online environments are affecting (and being affected by) the publishing industry.

Here’s an excerpt to get you started:

"While we have been busy attending conferences, workshops, and seminars
on every possible aspect of scholarly communication, information
technology, digital libraries, and e-publishing, students have been
quietly revolutionizing the discovery and use of information. Their
behavior, undertaken without consultation or attendance at formal
academic events, urgently forces those of us in scholarly publishing to
confront some fundamental questions about our organizations, jobs, and
assumptions about our work.

Most students today arrive at college assuming that a Google search is
the first choice for doing research, that MySpace is the model for
creating online content and building peer communities, and — perhaps
most important — that multitasking with various electronic devices,
often from remote locations, is the traditional way to do class work.
The implications of those changes must transform our publishing
strategies.

If "digital natives" are the next audience for our scholarly resources,
shouldn’t we be thinking about new ways to organize, store, and deliver
our content? In fact, is content even what we should be focusing on for
this next generation of users, or are the tools, functionality, and
access built on top of the content what are of real value?

As publishers, we are going to have to adapt quickly and creatively if
we wish to remain true to our missions as information professionals and
yet be relevant to users. Are we ready?"

Well, are we? Get thee now to the Chronicle of Higher Education and read! Read!

From today’s New York Times (links & excerpt):

Four Librarians Finally Break Silence in Records Case

Four Connecticut librarians who had been barred from
revealing that they had received a request for patrons’ records from
the federal government spoke out yesterday, expressing frustration
about the sweeping powers given to law enforcement authorities by the
USA Patriot Act.

The librarians took turns at the
microphone at their lawyers’ office and publicly identified themselves
as the collective John Doe who had sued the United States attorney
general after their organization received a confidential demand for
patron records in a secret counterterrorism case. They had been
ordered, under the threat of prosecution, not to talk about the request
with anyone. The librarians, who all have leadership roles at a small
consortium called Library Connection in Windsor, Conn., said they
opposed allowing the government unchecked power to demand library
records and were particularly incensed at having been subject to the
open-ended nondisclosure order.