SLA Government Information Division

What Exactly is a 'Diplomatic Cable'?

This is the 21st century, so why are we still talking about State Department cables?

The Slate Magazine Explainer column explains just that in the 29 November 2010 article "What's a Diplomatic Cable? And why is the State Department still using them?" With help from the National Archives and State, author Brian Palmer discovers that there really isn't much functional difference between email and State's diplomatic cables. The word "cable" is used nostalgically to refer to the internal messaging system that has replaced the old undersea cable network. 

[h/t @dcpest]

 

Plain Writing Act of 2010: Guidance

The new Plain Writing Act of 2010 (Public Law 111-274) requires U.S. federal executive branch agencies to communicate to the public in clear, easily understood language. The law defines "plain writing" as "writing that is clear, concise, well-organized, and follows other best practices appropriate to the subject or field and intended audience."

The law also requires the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to issue guidance to agencies on implementing the new practices. OMB issued interim guidance to agencies on 22 November 2010 (M-11-05, Preliminary Guidance for the Plain Writing Act of 2010). The OMB memorandum provides a fuller description of plain writing:

Plain writing is concise, simple, meaningful, and well-organized. It avoids jargon, redundancy, ambiguity, and obscurity. It does not contain unnecessary complexity.

Further assistance comes from two websites, PlainLanguage.gov and Webcontent.gov. PlainLanguage.gov is managed by the Plain Language Action and Information Network (PLAIN), an interagency group that has been active for over 10 years. The new Plain Writing Act designates PLAIN as the official interagency working group assisting in developing compliance guidance. PlainLanguage.gov already provides documents to assist agencies, including their existing Federal Plain Language Guidelines. The site also links to plain language examples and resources that may be of use to any organization. PLAIN offers a twitter feed, govplainlang, with news and writing tips.

WebContent.gov, operated by the Federal Web Managers Council, provides information on plain writing for the web on their page Writing for the Web/Plain Language.

The Plain Writing Act requires OMB to issue its final guidance to agencies by 13 April 2011.

Tax Foundation: Federal Tax Cuts Effect on State Budgets

The Tax Foundation issued a report on 22 November 2010 on a timely topic: How Would Expiration of Bush-Era Tax Cuts Affect State and Local Budgets? (Special Report 187). The report includes a state-by-state chart of how states would be directly affected.

Stateline.org discusses the report in detail in their article Uncertainty of Bush-era tax cuts leaves states in budget limbo, 22 November 2010. From the article:

The Tax Foundation says that those state income tax systems that piggyback off federal income taxes will see an automatic uptick in revenue if the Bush tax cuts expire. But a handful of states that allow taxpayers to deduct for federal income taxes paid will likely see a revenue loss.

World Bank Development Reports: Online, Free

The World Bank recently announced a new, free online service: The Complete World Development Report Online (http://wdronline.worldbank.org/). This is a searchable collection of all of the Bank's annual World Development Reports (WDRs) since 1978. The book-length WDRs present analysis and policy recommendations on a specific theme each year. They include supporting data tables and a bibliography of commissioned background papers and outside sources. The 2010 WDR focused on the relationship between development challenges and global climate change. The 2011 WDR, to be released in April 2011, will focus on "conflict, security, and development."

Access the WDR content by either search, title browse (same as year browse), or topic browse. You can search across all WDR's or within a single title. View the reports by section in HTML or download an entire report in PDF format. The site's Related Content tab has a browseable interface to the background papers commissioned by the authors of each report. Browse by year to see all papers done for that year's report. Browse by topic to see individual papers on a specific sub-topic. The reports are online in PDF.

The site can be used at no charge and without registration. Individuals or institutions that choose to register for an account can take advantage of additional features. A researcher with an individual account can save searches, save documents, and take notes, for example. An institutional account enables libraries to collect COUNTER-compliant use statistics.

Measuring Link Rot Rates in State, Federal Web Content

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" is an old management adage. Sarah Rhodes of Georgetown University helps us with the measurement part in her recent journal article Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability (Law Library Journal vol. 102 no. 4). Sarah reports her analysis of link rot data based on a sample from the archive of the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group, a "collaborative digital preservation program established to preserve and ensure permanent access to vital legal information currently available in digital formats on the World Wide Web."

Due to the nature of the archive, "more than 90% of the top-level domains in the sample were state government (state.[state code].us), organization (.org), or government (.gov) URLs, representing approximately 41%, 32%, and 17% of the sample, respectively." The archived materials are predominantly PDFs. Among her findings: The state government, .org, and .gov domains were the leaders in link rot, with state government outpacing them all.

As Sarah explains, the Chesapeake Group's archive is highly selective and not representative of Web archives in general. For details on the definitions and methodology used for this study, see the full article.

[h/t @richards1000]

Harvard Business School Case Study: Data.gov

UPDATE: The authors of the study have made it available for free to government employees (in PDF).

The Harvard Business School online newsletter Working Knowledge summarizes a recent Harvard Business Review case study on Data.gov in the 16 November 2010 article Data.Gov: Matching Government Data with Rapid Innovation, by Martha Lagace. The case study itself must be purchased for $12.00.

Assistant Professor Karim R. Lakhani led the study in part to discuss "how Data.gov should reconcile both its public-citizen aspects of accountability and its potential to mediate private innovation."

Lakhani also used Data.gov as a model for the private sector, saying, "CIOs and CEOs could consider what data they should make available throughout their enterprise...It would be great if any employee could look at data and think about different ways to mash it up. Just as there are concerns about security and privacy with the government's data, there are security, privacy, and intellectual property concerns about private-sector data. But Data.gov shows that those things are manageable."

[h/t @dslunceford]

State Library's New Digital Preservation Education Site

The State Library of North Carolina launched a digital preservation education site today. From their blog post:

The site, http://digitalpreservation.ncdcr.gov, has resources that can help North Carolina government employees – and those responsible for digital information in general – learn how to ensure that today’s digital information is saved so that it can become tomorrow’s heritage.

From the website:

If you create or are responsible for digital materials that you or others will need to access at some point in the future, then you should have a basic understanding of how to care for those files.

The main section of the site walks you through "what is digital preservation?" to learning about the technology and processes. The Learn section links to tutorials and workshops.

Although the site was designed for North Carolina state government employees, it is generic enough to be of any use to anyone wanting to learn the basics of digital preservation.

Creation of the site was supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

Growth, Gaps in U.S. Broadband Adoption

Today the Commerce Department released what they are calling "the most accurate statistical profile of U.S. broadband Internet adoption in the United States." The department's Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) produced the report, Exploring the Digital Nation: Home Broadband Internet Adoption in the United States [PDF], also referred to as Digital Nation II. Today's report follows a February 2010 NTIA research preview, Digital Nation: 21st Century America's Progress toward Universal Broadband Internet Access [PDF].

The report looks at factors affecting the rate of home broadband adoption and provides data tables such as average broadband use by state. NTIA's 8 November 2010 news release summarizes the major findings in the report.

Government Social Media Timeline

Did you know that, with their Womenshealth.gov account, the Department of Health and Human Services was the first U.S. federal agency on Twitter? Or that in 2009 the Food and Drug Administration created a web widget to track peanut recalls?

Read all about it on the U.S. Government Use of Social Media timeline from the General Services Administration (GSA) Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement.The timeline uses the Dipity.com free multimedia timeline website.

Are you with a federal agency? If so, take a look at the site and let GSA Center for New Media know if you have content to add.

Controlled Unclassified Information - New U.S. Rules

President Obama issued an executive order (E.O. 13557, 4 November 2010) calling for clear and consistent policies for "controlled unclassified information" (CUI) across the executive branch. CUI can include such data as personally identifiable information and trade secrets.

The order defines controlled unclassified information (CUI) as "information that requires safeguarding or dissemination controls pursuant to and consistent with law, regulations, and Government-wide policies, excluding information that is classified under Executive Order 13526 of December 29, 2009, or the Atomic Energy Act, as amended." Under the order, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) will coordinate the development of new classification rules and make that information publicly available.

Steven Aftergood explains in his Secrecy News blog post, A New Policy on Controlled Unclassified Info:

The new CUI framework will replace the multiplicity of agency markings such as “sensitive but unclassified,” “for official use only,” and over a hundred more. By prohibiting the use of such improvised markings and by adopting a standard CUI marking which is subject to external approval and oversight across the executive branch, the new policy is expected to facilitate information sharing among agencies without fostering new secrecy.