Reps. Darrell Issa and Elijah Cummings — two members of Congress who don’t agree on much — both agree that e-government web sites need to have their funding restored. They expressed their support at a hearing Tuesday.
H/T InfoDocket
In other news, the White House says the federal government has too many specialized web sites, but they weren’t talking about USASpending.gov.
Census Bureau’s Statistical Compendia Branch
From Library Journal’s annual “Notable Government Documents” roundup:
Don’t count on the Census Bureau
In response to the President’s call for “an aggressive, Government-wide effort to curb non-essential administrative spending,” Census Bureau director Robert Groves eliminated the Statistical Compendia Branch (SCB) and, with it, the print and online versions of Statistical Abstract of the United States and other key reference works. Unless Congress funds the SCB, the 130th edition of Statistical Abstract—one of the most notable documents of all time—will be the last published.This decision is troubling in part because the Census Bureau’s sole criticism of this heavily used source is invalid. In the “U.S. Census Bureau’s Budget Estimates as Presented to Congress, February 2011,” the bureau justified its decision with the following: “The availability elsewhere of much of the information in the Statistical Abstract has led the Department and Census Bureau to the difficult decision to terminate the program.” That this title’s content is available elsewhere misses the point. Statistical Abstract exists so that users can find frequently cited statistics in one source rather than hundreds. The process by which the Census Bureau reached its decision is also disconcerting. Put simply, the failure to involve librarians and users in conversation about the SCB and its publications is an affront to open government.
E-government sites
Although Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) claimed he could keep some e-government sites going after their budget was slashed by three quarters, the government’s own chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, says “No project will go unaffected.” Read his letter to Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.).
The National Academies (of Sciences, of Engineering) are the government’s science advisors. Whenever there’s a tough issue of science or technology, it gets thrown to them to figure out.
More than 4,000 National Academies Press PDFs now available to download for free:
The National Academies—National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council—are committed to distributing their reports to as wide an audience as possible. Since 1994 we have offered “Read for Free” options for almost all our titles. [But you had to read them one page at a time. — WL] In addition, we have been offering free downloads of most of our titles to everyone and of all titles to readers in the developing world. We are now going one step further. Effective June 2nd, PDFs of reports that are currently for sale on the National Academies Press (NAP) Website and PDFs associated with future reports* will be offered free of charge to all Web visitors.
From the Sacramento Bee:
Spring passed California by, and summer remains in hiding.
Nine tornadoes have torn up the Sacramento Valley from Oroville to Fairfield. A giant Sierra snowpack, still frozen fast, has put innumerable summer adventures on hold.
The Golden State’s weather has gone haywire.
And it’s not over yet: Sacramento can expect as much as another 1.4 inches of rain this weekend and temperatures 20 degrees below normal, with more mountain snow.
“It’s what I call global weirding,” said Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “This has been a very strange year all over the planet.”
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/06/04/3676297/researcher-says-climate-change.html#ixzz1OSkdqxBH
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