Foreign Policy In Focus

Foreign Policy in Focus is a joint project of the International Relations Center and the Institute for Policy Studies FPIF's political agenda, in its own words: "FPIF aims to amplify the voice of progressives and to build links with social movements in the U.S. and around the world. Through these connections, we advance and influence debate and discussion among academics, activists, policymakers, and decisionmakers." Among much interesting material, see the recent exchange by Nancy Snow and others on public diplomacy and anti-Americanism.

History News Network

George Mason University's History News Network
argues that the history in the media is too often abridged to serve the purposes of journalists, economists, politicians, pollsters and others seeking to shape public opinion. HNN's mission statement:"To expose politicians who misrepresent history. To point out bogus analogies. To deflate beguiling myths. To remind Americans of the irony of history. To put events in context. To remind us all of the complexity of history." The sections on Breaking News and Hot Topics will be of particular PD interest.

LC RSS feeds

The Library of Congress is now offering a number of RSS feeds....

General

• News
  A bulletin service of the latest news from the world's preeminent reservoir of knowledge, providing resources to Congress and the American people
• Upcoming Events
  Listing of the dozens of free concerts, lectures, exhibitions, symposia, films and other special programs offered at the Library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
• New on the Web
  Updates on new collections, features, reference materials and other services available on the Library's award-winning Web site
• New Webcasts
  The latest webcasts and podcasts of lectures and events sponsored by the Library
• What's New in Science Reference
  New products and services on the subject of science and technology from the Library's Science, Technology & Business Division

Copyright (from the U.S. Copyright Office)

• Current Legislation
  Notices of Current copyright-related legislation
• Federal Register Notices
  Announcements, rules, proposed rules and other notices published in the Federal Register
• NewsNet
  Alerts on hearings, deadlines for comments, new and proposed regulations, new publications and more
• What's New on the U.S. Copyright Office Web site
  What's New on the Copyright Office Web site

International Calendar of Events

The State Department's Office of International Information Programs has put together a nice International Events Calendar for events that are of interest to the international relations community. Includes links to State Department information on events and issues.

2006 best 2.0 applications

The 2006 award-winning web2.0 applications are worth a browse..

Future of bibliographic control

From LOC, a Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control "Advances in search-engine technology, the popularity of the Internet and the influx of electronic information resources have greatly changed the way libraries do their work. To address those changes, the Library of Congress has convened a Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control to examine the future of bibliographic description in the 21st century."

DOJ capital punishment report

DOJ's Bureau of Justice Statistics has released its annual report on capital punishment Presents characteristics of persons under sentence of death on December 31, 2005 and of persons executed in 2005. Preliminary data on executions by States during 2006 are included. The report also summarizes the movement of prisoners into and out of death sentence status during 2005.

Creating dynamic research guides with OPML

Wilcox, Kimberley, "Gear Up Your Research Guides with the Emerging OPML Codes" (Computers in Libraries, Nov-Dec 2006, pp. 7-8; 46; 48).
http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/nov06/Wilcox.shtml
Outline Processor Mark­up Language (OPML) is not widely-adopted yet, but its ability to create dynamic research guides, with feeds of new titles from the library catalog and databases, latest headlines from selected blogs, etc. should attract the interest of reference librarians. Wilcox discusses how to start taking advantage of OPML even before the most popular RSS aggregators fully support it.

U.S. entry process rated worst by travelers

The Discover America Partnership is an " effort led by some of America's foremost business leaders to strengthen America's image around the globe. These leaders recognize that public diplomacy is not the sole responsibility of government, but also of business and the American people." The group recently issued a report demonstrating that the U.S. entry process is considered the "world’s worst" by international travelers. The organization suggests that minor improvements in welcoming travelers could yield substantial diplomatic and economic gains. Read the 11/20 press release and summary of findings.

p.s. - the commercial sector appears to be very committed to the PD cause! In the past week alone, 3 such organizations have come to my attention...in addition to the Discover America Partnership, there's Business for Diplomatic Action (discussed in post below) and Compete America.

Understanding the Federal Courts

This latest version of Understanding the Federal Courts is from 2003. Available as an attractive pdf or easy to navigate website.

Transforming NATO (again)

CSIS recently released "Transforming NATO (again): a Primer for the NATO Summit in Riga 2006". The report, a joint effort by CSIS, the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, and the Clingendael Centre for Strategic Studies, provides an overview of inititatives slated to emerge from the Summit, and offers suggestions on ways for the Alliance to prepare for its next summit in either 2008 or 2009.

Free Government Info

Free Government Info (FGI) has many interesting nooks and crannies (see f.ex. its blogroll of "recommended government information blogs" ) , and is surely worth checking in on from time to time. It also provides an RSS feed...you can read it when you drop by here under "more RSS feeds" on your left, or subscribe to it directly.

World's best blog?

Deutsche Welle's Best of the Blogs has named the Sunlight Foundation blog as winner of the 2006 International Weblog Awards. The mission of the Sunlight Foundation is (in its own words) "to use the power of the Internet and technology to help citizens learn more about what Congress and its representatives are doing, and help reduce corruption and produce greater transparency and accountability in government. The blog has been the epicenter for the Foundation, where the group writes about its projects, exhorts readers to join into investigations and updates people on these "distributed journalism" efforts."

Converting search to RSS

Saving your search as an rss feed is a good way to continually update your search results, without having to go back to reenter the search periodically. Both Google News and Yahoo News allow you to do this by clicking on the RSS icon once you've conducted your search. There are however a number of other services that enable the same kind of alert service via RSS, including Technorati (for the blogosphere) and Findarticles (for magazines and journals). Sharon Hously of FeedForAll has put together a very useful overview of such "RSS Ego Search" services at the RSS-Specifications site.

Foreign Media Relations Guide

Here's an article by Alvin Snyder that compares the public diplomacy approaches of the State Department with the way it's done in the commercial sector. The article discusses the organization Business for Diplomatic Action(BDA) (very slick website!) The mission of BDA is "to enlist the U.S. business community in actions to improve the standing of America in the world with the goal of once again, seeing America admired as a global leader and respected as a courier of progress and prosperity for all people." This it aims to achieve through its 5 point strategy plan, STARS:
Sensitize key U.S. constituents to the rise in anti-Americanism and its implications.
Transform the bad American attitudes that exacerbate the problem.
Accentuate America’s positive qualities and contributions to the world community.
Reach out to business leaders in strategic world markets to build new bridges of mutual respect and understanding.
Serve as the private sector connection for public diplomacy efforts by the U.S. government.

The organization recently issued a Foreign Media Relations Guide, which Snyder compares and contrasts interestingly with Karen Hughes's "Karen's Rules," the IIP media guidelines recently issued to the field. (see article by Elizabeth Williams in the WP Nov.8 and Karen Hughes's letter to the editor/rebuttal in today's (11/16)Post.

Civil rights database

From Researchbuzz: Washington University in St. Louis has created a new database of materials related to civil rights courts cases, including settlements, court orders, opinions, and case study research. The “Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse” contains documents related to over 1,000 cases and is available at http://clearinghouse.wustl.edu/ .

Immigration statistics

DHS has published some recent immigration statistics including profiles of legal and unauthorized residents by country of birth. Another resource that might be useful for IRCs is the 112 page Welcome to the United States Guide for New Immigrants, available in 11 languages.

Death and taxes

"Death and Taxes" provides a representational graph of the federal discretionary budget, ie the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected representatives in Congress. Not sure if this is a very useful way to study the budget on a computer screen, but it looks nice, and might make a nice slide in a powerpoint presentation (also available in hardcopy as a poster!)

Ask.com's election day page

Ask.com's election page should just about cover it. Analysis, resources, and a dropdown that takes you directly to "voter info by state."

Presidential speeches tag clouds

Chirag Mehta's "US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud" site is really neat! By comparing tag clouds from presidential speeches 1776-2006, you get a vivid picture of how the agenda has changed over the years. The tag clouds show the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2006 AD. Cycle through the administrations by using the slide rule at the top. Awesome!

Thinkature

Thinkature is a collaborative brainstorming web2.0 application. Collaboration is enabled through a shared workspace and chat. Looks very impressive...will report back once I've tried it out with some collaborateurs...

Yahoo election site

Yahoo's midterm election site appears to be a very complete service, drawing on a wide range of wire, print, broadcast and web sources. Bookmark for tomorrow!

Constitution Finder

Constitution Finder is a handy collection of constitutions in English...for a more thorough annotation, see Virtual Library Cat

CFR election guide

CFR's election guide is "A cross section of recent Backgrounders, op-eds, meeting transcripts, and interviews from CFR.org, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Foreign Affairs."

Adding translation flags

Just below the ircworld banner you'll see that an assortment of translation flags have been added to the blog. Essentially, all this does is save the curious non-English speaking visitor the bothersome extra-step of having to cut and paste text into a translator like Babelfish. Machine-translated text is of sub-human quality, but occasionally good enough to provide some notion of what the text is about. And although the translations may generate more mirth than enlightenment, it is always a nice gesture to acknowledge that not everyone speaks English. For instructions on how to do this (some simple cutting and pasting of code) see the Digital Inspiration blog.

Combined Arms Research Library (CARL)

CARL is an essential resource for reseaching military and military history topics. Lots and lots of free information! In its own words...."The Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) electronic collections are largely composed of digital versions of paper documents from the CARL collections. Our intent is to improve the visibility and use of the intellectual resources at CARL by expanding the potential audience beyond the walls of the Library. The CARL will continue to select and digitize appropriate documents to meet the original goals of preservation and dissemination. We will also be adding documents received originally in electronic form."

Congressional staff salaries

Legistorm reports, "At long last, US congressional staff salaries are available for free on the web - and only here at LegiStorm." Disappointingly, it's only informaton about the salaries that is available, but even that might be useful. Legistorm says it has no partisan agenda and simply wants to make Congress as transparent as possible...and promises more resources to come, so it might be a site worth checking occasionally. A companion site, Storming Media is "an independent reseller of Pentagon and other US federal government reports on many subjects." Although documents are resold for a fee, the site is information rich and well organized and abstracts are free. In many cases, having the citation will enable the resourceful librarian to locate the document elsewhere, free of charge.

2 interesting election sites

Here are a couple of election sites snipped from the latest issue of Neat New Stuff . Electionline focuses on the timely issue of election reform, and includes a 75 page pdf. report "Election Preview 2006" - the report is "a comprehensive report on the state of election administration around the country" and "finds cause for concern in a number of states." A nice handout for journalists covering the election! The RealClear site is a feast for political junkies/gluttons.

annotations from Neat New Stuff...

• Electionline.org [Election Reform Information Project] http://www.electionline.org/ "the nation's only non-partisan, non-advocacy website providing up-to-the- minute news and analysis on election reform" provides info on the new procedures, new machines, and new rules that may affect the ability of citizens to have their votes registered and counted. Check here for your own states' laws on voting systems, paper trail laws, voter ID laws, provisional voting rules, voter registration databases, and early/absentee voting rules.

• RealClear Politics http://www1.realclearpolitics.com All the latest political news and polls for individual races for governor, Senate, and House of Representatives

OIG reviews IIP Speaker Program

The Office of the Inspector General's review of the IIP Speaker Program is the subject of an article that appeared in the November 2 Philadelphia Inquirer. Senator Joe Biden requested the review following a news story last year that suggested the Department was using a "political litmus test" for vetting and weeding out speakers critical of the Bush administration. The OIG's report concludes that no such litmus test exists under current leadership, but also applauds a new "Strategic Speakers Initiative" (SSI) that "should continue as a more focused stand-alone program to allow articulation on strategic policy issues." The SSI should complement a conventional speaker program that "places emphasis on a realistic balance in the selection of speakers." Read the OIG review here.

LibraryThing

At LibraryThing you can catalog your own book collection and participate in a community of likeminded readers by sharing books and tags with others.

Google's Librarian Center

Google's Librarian Center has some useful stuff, and the newsletter is worth subscribing to. In the "your stories section" I found Laurie the Librarian's webcast/tutorial on how to set up and use Google reader, if you're having trouble getting started with RSS. Knowing how to create an online tutorial might be useful for IRCs, e.g. to walk people through the visa application process, show how to participate in a webchat, etc.

Immigration to the U.S., 1789-1930

From the Harvard University Library's Open Collections program: Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930
"Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930, is a web-based collection of selected historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums that documents voluntary immigration to the US from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression."

Get your NYPL card now!

An ircworld post a few months ago referred to Kevin Kelly's article about the virtues of getting a New York Public Library card and - for CA residents - a SFPL card. I've since learned that anyone anywhere in the world can be the proud holder of an NYPL card - mine just arrived in the mail today! For the $100 annual fee, anyone anywhere can get full access to approximately 85 databases - this is something you might like to mention to academic and library contacts wherever you are!

Multiple-engine search

In her interesting presentation for NOLUG at the Oslo College yesterday, Marydee Ojala mentioned that Google and Yahoo were so displeased with the wonderfully named Yagoohoogle , that its owner has obliged by renaming it Twingine (note that a similar service, Yahoogle, is still out there, whatever G and Y may feel about it) Marydee showed us some other interesting multiple engine services: www.jux2.com searches in G, Y, and M, and displays the distribution of results between the three engines. And ranking.thumbshots.com is neat, but only works in IE. It compares searches (2 at a time) between alltheweb, altavista, teoma, wisenut, google, yahoo, and msn, and creates a graphic display of overlapping hits and shows where in the respective SE rankings the hits occur. It also displays links that are unique to each of the engines. Mousing over any of the hits (ie. links) displays a thumbshot of the site.

This morning I stumbled upon another interesting multiple engine search service, resultr This service allows you to create and save your own custom made search engines, by combining from more than 40 pre-selected search engines in 8 categories (News, Blogs, Media, Jobs, Social Info, Reference, Shopping and Local). Unfortunately, there is no way (that I could see) of adding your own favorites - for example Firstgov.gov - to the menu of engines you can select from. Such a feature would make it a far more useful service.

Library as conversation

ALA and the Information Institute of Syracuse University have prepared a draft paper on libraries and Web2.0 Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation . Once again, the virtues of conversation...

5 Weeks to a Social Library

Social Library? Sign up for this online course if you want to learn all about it.. "Five Weeks to a Social Library, the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries." And if you're not one of the lucky 40 participants who will be expected (or if you don't have time), know that "course content will be freely viewable to interested parties and all live Webcasts will be archived for later viewing."

Google launches docs.google.com

Google takes another step in moving computing from your pc to the web with its launch of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. The document part of the service is simply Writely in bought (not borrowed) Google finery - Google bought Writely back in March. Go to www.writely.com now and you'll end just end up at the new Google site.

Firstgov Reference Page

The Reference Center and General Government page at Firstgov has lots of useful stuff, including maps, a locator for local, federal, and national libraries, list of online library databases, agency telephone directories, free image and photo banks, and much more.

Politics and technology

Neat New Stuff alerts us this week to an article that might be of interest to contacts with an interest in U.S. politics: "Librarian Laura Gordon-Murnane provides an excellent review, with links, of the top liberal and conservative blogs, candidate blogs, official party blogs, and local political blogs.Politics and Tech Tools - Blogs, Aggregators and Tracking Tools" http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/oct06/Gordon-Murnane.shtml

Population Research Bureau

This month the population of the U.S. will exceed 300 million. A wonderful reference resource for information about population, migration and demographics is the Population Reference Bureau, publishers of the 2006 World Population Data Sheet.

Another new portrait of American (youth) civic participation

Yet another gloomy snapshot of American attitudes towards civic participation is provided by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at the University of Maryland.
In a report released yesterday, they found that nearly two-thirds of young Americans were disengaged from political and civic life and only a quarter regularly voted.
Still, not all the results were grim.
Seventy-two percent of youths said they followed the news at least some of the time to see what was happening in government and public affairs.
The 37 page report can be accessed at:
http://www.civicyouth.org/PopUps/2006_cphs_report.pdf

Google gadgets

Google has rolled out a number of gadgets you can add to your webpages with a little cutting and pasting of code. Although USG websites will want to steer away from the frivolous, some of these might actually be useful: a calendar to show embassy events, a translator or dictionary widget where visitors can quickly translate or lookup words they might be uncertain about, a map which shows the location of the embassy or an embassy event, a currency converter for pages with consular fees, or an American history quiz for your American history page. More interesting than the specific gadgets is the underlying web2.0 concept of developing such things that can be shared across websites...for the adventuresom, the API is available here.

Human Rights search engine

Hurisearch is a search engine for human rights information. In its own words.....

• It gives you direct access to the content of over 3000 human rights websites. Currently over 2'300'000 pages have been indexed.
• It filters out the non-relevant content: only the pages from websites with a main focus on human rights are indexed.
• It provides fresh information. The crawler visits all sites periodically. The frequency depends on the type of organisation: every 24 hours for the Intergovernmental Organisations, National Human Rights Institutions, and Academic Institutions; every 8 days for the NGO collection
• It uses powerful drill-down techniques which become indispensable for in-depth searching: search by language, by organisation, by country, and more.
• It instantly analyses search results and recognizes the prevalent human rights themes - suggesting new and useful search directions.
• It prominently displays information produced by local grassroots organisations who often produce very relevant first-hand information (these important sources are lost by larger non-specialized search engines).
• It is completely independent from political or commercial interests - this is guaranteed by HURIDOCS.

Foreign policy debate

Stanley Hoffman reviews books by Francis Fukuyama, Stephen M. Walt, and John Brady Kiesling in "The Foreign Policy the U.S. Needs" (New York Review of Books, Volume 53, Number 13 · August 10, 2006) John Brady Kiesling is a former Political Counselor at the embassy in Athens who resigned from the foreign service in 2003. His resignation letter held that U.S. foreign policy was no longer compatible with U.S. values or interests. The chapter on public diplomacy in his new book, "Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower," argues that "The realistic goal of public diplomacy is not to make America loved...the attainable goal of public diplomacy is to foster an image of the United States that is tolerable enough to ordinary, conventional human beings that foreign governments, whether fundamentalist tyrannies or liberal democracies, can easily afford the political cost of cooperating with the American superpower on terms close to those we seek."

Treaty status on Thomas

Two features of Thomas.loc.gov not to be overlooked are the treaties page, which allows you to track treaties by word/phrase, number, Congress number, type, or date transmitted to the Senate, and the "Legislative Resources for Teachers" section, with "Classroom resources and general information for educators at all levels."

Hard or soft pd?

Here's an article about a recently leaked report from the Pentagon that recommends a tougher PD approach in broadcasts to Iran. Al Snyder dicusses the article in the context of the familiar debate about hard vs. soft diplomacy, ie. whether PD's best chances lie in changing minds or in changing hearts.

Genealogy and Family History Resource

Despite its 1998 look, the Genealogy and Family History Internet Web Directory is an impressive, up to date resource: "Key worldwide educational Internet genealogical databases and resources. This is a professional genealogy and family history worldwide humanities and social sciences mega portal, connected to thousands of related sub-sets, with billions of primary or secondary database records."

WP political ads database

The Washington Post's political ads database "includes political advertisements funded by campaigns, parties, committees, and independent advocacy groups. Most of the ads are tied to specific U.S. House, U.S. Senate, or gubernatorial races throughout the country. Some of the ads are more general "issue" or advocacy ads not tied to a particular race or candidate." Many different search options, including by candidate/organization, state, party, type of race, issue, character (e.g. "real people", "blue collar", "children"), type of ad (e.g. "attack", "emotional", "biographical"), cue, type of music, etc. Should be of great interest to political scientists/U.S. election pundits!

LLRX.com - CRS Reports

LLRX.com - CRS Reports More than you ever wanted to know about CRS reports, including
Historical Introduction
CRS
CRS Products
Where to Look Online for CRS Reports
General Listings
Subject Specialist Listings
Limited Listings
Fee-based Access Sources

Federal Forms Catalog

www.forms.gov..."The U.S. Government's Offical Hub for Federal Forms" - provides citizens and businesses with a common access point to federal agency forms.

New portrait of American civic participation

The National Conference on Citizenship, a nonprofit organization created by Congress, has just released a 47-page report on American civic participation. Its findings appear to confirm a decline in the willingness of Americans, especially the poor and less educated, to be involved with their communities.
This study, following up on the work of Robert "Bowling Alone" Putnam, can be accessed at:

http://www.ncoc.net/conferences/2006civichealth.pdf

A Washington Post article, writing about the launch of the report and featuring Putnam's response, can be found at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/18/AR2006091801118.html

Supreme Court oral arguments

From a SC press release:Press Release - September 14, 2006: "Beginning with the October 2006 Term, the Court will make the transcripts of oral arguments available free to the public on its Web site, www.supremecourtus.gov, on the same day an argument is heard by the Court."

GPO Access Core Documents

Here's what GPO says about the Core Documents service:
Core Documents of U.S. Democracy

To provide American citizens direct online access to the basic Federal Government documents that define our democratic society, a core group of current and historical Government publications is being made available for free, permanent, public access via GPO Access. These titles contain information which is vital to the democratic process and critical to an informed electorate. They support the public's right to know about the essential activities of their Government. Immediate, online access to authenticated versions of these Core Documents of Democracy increases in importance as Americans grow ever more dependent on remote electronic access to basic information resources -- both past and present.

Another site for 09/11 conspiracy buffs...

Another resource - in addition to the NIST site (posted below) - that addresses the conspiracy theories surrounding 09/11 is this Popular Mechanics article.

Documents in the news

Journalists aren't always meticulous about providing sufficient information about the the documents they cite (ie., "According to a new government report...") Peggy Garvin's brief guide to "documents in the news" sites is useful when tracking documents that prove to be elusive despite their newsworthiness.

Ready for elections?

Marylaine Block discusses some of her favorite election sites in this short article.

NIST and the WTC

NIST and the World Trade Center Conspiracy buffs will be troubled by this fact-filled National Institute of Standards and Technology site on factors contributing to the probable cause of the post-impact collapse of the WTC towers. The site presents detailed results of a three year building and fire safety investigation.

GovTrack

Thanks to Ankara for a tip about GovTrack which describes itself thus:

GovTrack.us is a nexus of information about the United States Congress, following the status of federal legislation and the activities of your senators and representatives.

GovTrack is an independent website run by a graduate student in his spare time. Data is collected from the official government websites via automated processes daily.

Guide to the Federal Register and CFR...and more

Thanks to Virtual Library Cat for the tip about Richard J. McKinney's useful Guide to the Federal Register and CFR While you're there, go up one directory to the Law Librarian's Society of Washington DC's legislative sourcebook for many other useful legislative sources!

Google's News Archive Search

Google's News Archive Search describes itself as "an easy way to search and explore historical archives. In addition to helping you search, News archive search can automatically create timelines which show selected results from relevant time periods." The "advanced archive search" feature lets you limit your results to items published between specified dates or years.