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Daily Archives: July 11, 2017

GPO’s beta website research update for July 2017

July 6, 2017 – Links to related bills on Congressional Record details pages, RSS notifications, link service

“Highlights from this release include links from Congressional Record Details pages to related bills, a variety of enhancements based on feedback from users, thumbnails in search results, pagination for optimized browsing, in-context help information, new developer tools including a govinfo link service, RSS notifications, minor fixes and improvements, and efforts behind the scenes as we continually work to improve how we’re managing the information you have access to through govinfo.”

  • Note – “govinfo is free U.S. Government information for all; govinfo is a service of the United States Government Publishing Office (GPO), which is a Federal agency in the legislative branch; govinfo provides free public access to more than a million official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government.

Paper – Crowdsourcing E-Book Accessibility Information and Impact on Staff Development

Crowdsourcing E-Book Accessibility Information and the Impact on Staff Development. Victoria Dobson, Leeds Beckett University; Alistair McNaught, JISC. Insights: the UKSG journal. Vol. 30, No. 2 (July 2017) “For students with print impairments, e-books offer great potential to remove barriers to information. However, for various reasons, not all e-books are fully accessible. Significant variability exists… Continue Reading

IG Audit of OPM IT Systems – Follow on to massive breach of employee data

Follow up to previous posting of November 2016 – Audit of OPM Security Systems Shows Continued Material Weakness – an update via NextGov: “More than two years after suffering a massive data beach [of over 20 million current and past federal employee personal data], the Office of Personnel Management still isn’t sufficiently vetting many of… Continue Reading

Critics Blocked from President’s Twitter Account File Suit

Knight First Amendment Institute: “Joined by seven individuals from across the country, the Knight First Amendment Institute filed suit in the Southern District of New York today contending that President Trump and his communications team are violating the First Amendment by blocking individuals from the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account because they criticized the president or his… Continue Reading

New Report Reveals Google’s Extensive Financial Support for Academia

News release: [July 11, 2017] Campaign for Accountability released a new report, Google Academics Inc., revealing Google’s extensive financial support for academics and policy experts.  CfA identified 329 research papers published between 2005 and 2017 on public policy matters of interest to Google that were in some way funded by the company. Read the report… Continue Reading

Collaborative investigative report on rollback of federal regulations

The Deep Industry Ties of Trump’s Deregulation Teams – “In February, President Trump ordered federal agencies to form task forces charged with finding regulations to weaken or eliminate. While the names of appointees to executive-agency task forces are typically made public, some agencies are refusing to reveal who is on their panels. The New York… Continue Reading

Pew survey – Online Harassment 2017

“This study measures the prevalence and patterns of online harassment by examining six broad categories of abusive behavior (see “Defining online harassment” in the accompanying box). These categories are identical to those used in Pew Research Center’s 2014 examination of online harassment. They are designed to capture a broad range of experiences – not just… Continue Reading