For the Feds among you, and anyone else who is interested in NARA
professionally or other agencies you deal with as a private citizen,
here's some more from the National Coalition for History on the Federal
budget outlook -- see item 1.
***********************************************************************
NCH WASHINGTON UPDATE (Vol. 12, #3; 20 JANUARY 2006)
by Bruce Craig (editor)
NATIONAL COALITION FOR HISTORY (NCH)
Website at http://www.h-net.org/~nch/
***********************************************************************
1. THE PRESIDENT'S BUDGET -- WHAT TO EXPECT
2. NIXON LIBRARY AGREES TO DEED OF GIFT FOR NIXON POLITICAL MATERIALS
3. SUNSHINE WEEK EVENTS ANNOUNCED
4. HISTORIAN LOUIS GALAMBOS APPOINTED TO KLUGE CHAIR
5. BITS AND BYTES: Copyright Roundtables Scheduled; Unpublished
Congressional Hearings Tally
Available
6. ARTICLES OF INTEREST: "America By the Numbers" (Washington Post)
1. THE PRESIDENT'S BUDGET -- WHAT TO EXPECT
Early next month President Bush will advance to Congress a proposed
budget for operations of the
federal government for FY 2007. Though agency officials are generally
keeping silent (as they are
expected to until the budget is officially released), agency and Hill
insiders have been spreading the
news of what to expect. Specific numbers are hard to nail down, but
what we are hearing isn't good.
Recently, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow officially announced that his
goal is to make the President
look good on his 2004 campaign vow to cut the budget deficit in half by
2009. With a budget deficit of
$319 billion in 2005, Snow's Treasury, the Office of Management and
Budget, and the White House
are all looking for ways to cut the projected deficit by upward of $160
billion. The situation is worse
than that as economists are forecasting a deficit in 2006 of $400
billion, so the White House may be
looking for $200 billion!
Some believe it is virtually impossible to keep the federal government
running with a budget that makes
such deep cuts. Nevertheless, agency heads, when they make their annual
visits to OMB examiners,
are being asked to do their part in reducing growth in government
spending. Some were sent back to
make adjustments to their initial submissions to the White House. Many
agencies will be lucky to see
their budgets come in at last year's authorized levels; most domestic
agencies can expect massive
reductions and zeroing out of specific programs deemed "non-essential."
Bottom line, what the president is expected to offer in his budget is
an across-the-board "call for
sacrifices." Congress of course can and probably will ignore the
President's budget as they have in
recent years. Time will tell.
One last item...the debt ceiling is once again about to be exceeded.
Undoubtedly the White House will
try to downplay that which Secretary Snow will need to do in
mid-February -- request that Congress push
up the current debt limit above the $8.184 trillion level.
2. NIXON LIBRARY AGREES TO DEED OF GIFT FOR NIXON POLITICAL MATERIALS
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has released a
copy of the draft deed of
gift agreement that will be entered into by NARA and the Richard Nixon
Library and Birthplace
Foundation once the private library is absorbed into the presidential
library system. That donation is
expected to take place later this year. According to NARA officials,
"The Nixon Foundation has
agreed to the terms [of the agreement] and will sign the deed at the
time of transfer of the Nixon Library
to the National Archives." Sharon Fawcett, Assistant Archivist for
Presidential Libraries states that the
Nixon foundation accepted the NARA draft "without revision."
Under the terms of the deed, the Nixon foundation will "donate and
convey" to the federal government
"the portions of tapes and textual materials that are determined to
constitute private returnable
information concerning political activities in accordance with the
terms of the Presidential Recordings
and Materials Preservation Act (PRMPA)." NARA will review Nixon
political materials in the Nixon
tapes and historical materials held by NARA at its College Park
repository as part of the package for
transfer. The deed states that NARA will review the "political
materials" using "the same standards
that NARA used in reviewing the constitutional and statutory
conversations on the Nixon records and
other so called "c and s" materials from the Nixon presidency." It is
worth noting that the deed of gift in
no way affects the portions of tapes and textual materials that have
been or will be determined to
constitute information of a purely personal nature to President Nixon
or his family.
Among the items to be transferred are conversations in the Nixon White
House tapes, textual and other
audio-visual materials still in NARA's custody, and such materials
returned by NARA to the Nixon
estate that are currently located at the Yorba Linda library.
Furthermore, according to the agreement,
"It is the Donors wish that the Political/Returnable Materials be made
available for research as soon as
possible and to the fullest extent possible, in accordance with NARA's
review standards."
A copy of the agreement will soon be posted on the American Historical
Association webpage at:
http://www.historians.org .
3. SUNSHINE WEEK EVENTS ANNOUNCED
Each year a number of government openness organizations, including the
American Library
Association, American Society of Newspaper Editors, and
OpenTheGovernment.org, celebrate
"Sunshine Week," an annual event begun last year that seeks to raise
awareness of the importance of
open government. This year events will take place of 12-18 March 2006.
Programs will focuses
around the theme: "Are We Safer in the Dark? A National Dialogue on
Open Government and
Secrecy."
A panel discussion will serve as the kick-off event in Washington, DC
and then link via satellite to
locally hosted discussions in communities across the country. The hope
is that this panel of experts
from around the country will have a lively discussion about open
government and secrecy, the problems
Americans are facing with it, how it impacts communities, and what the
public can do about it.
The opening event will be Monday, 13 March 2006 from 1:00pm - 2:30pm ET
with local programs
following. [note: local times will vary.]
Regularly updated information can be found at
<http://www.openthegovernment.org/article/subarchive/85> , including a
listing of groups
sponsoring local programs. Online registration is now available at
<http://tinyurl.com/c57xr> and will
continue through 6 March 2006.
4. HISTORIAN LOUIS GALAMBOS APPOINTED TO KLUGE CHAIR
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has appointed Louis Galambos
to the Cary and Ann Maguire
Chair in American History and Ethics at the John W. Kluge Center,
effective 1 January 2006.
Galambos, a professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, is
the fourth recipient of the honor.
The holder of the Maguire Chair conducts research on ethical issues
associated with American history.
Research may include the conduct of politics and government at all
levels of American life as well as the
role of religion, business, urban affairs, law, science, and medicine
in the ethical dimensions of
leadership.
Galambos was editor of the 21-volume publication "The Papers of Dwight
David Eisenhower from
1971 to 1995," and co-editor with Daun van Ee, a curator in the
Manuscript Division at the Library of
Congress, from 1995 to 2001. The last of the 21 volumes was completed
in 2001, with the publication
of a four-volume set titled "The Presidency: Keeping the Peace."
Galambos also has taught at Rice, Rutgers, and Yale universities, and
he has served as president of the
Business History Conference and the Economic History Association. A
former editor of The Journal of
Economic History, Galambos has written extensively on U.S. business
history, on business-government
relations, on the economic aspects of modern institutional development
in America and on the rise of
the bureaucratic state.
Galambos, who received his Ph.D. from Yale, was a senior fellow of the
National Endowment for the
Humanities and a business history fellow at Harvard University's
Graduate School of Business
Administration. In addition, he has held fellowships at the Woodrow
Wilson Center and at Princeton
University.
Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of
Congress established the Kluge
Center in 2000 to bring together the world's best thinkers to
stimulate, energize, and distill wisdom
form the Library's rich resources and to interact with policymakers in
Washington.
For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge.
5. BITS AND BYTES
Item #1 -- Copyright Roundtables Scheduled: A committee appointed by
the Library of Congress will
hold two public roundtables in March 2006 in Los Angeles and in
Washington, D.C. to gather insights
and opinions on how to revise copyright exceptions for libraries and
archives (Section 108 of the
Copyright Act). The committee consists of independent experts from the
commercial and not-for-profit
sectors. The roundtables, which are free and open to the public, will
be held Wednesday, 8 March in
Los Angeles and on Thursday, 16 March in Washington, D.C. The committee
is charged to re-
examine the exceptions and limitations applicable to libraries and
archives under the Copyright Act,
specifically in light of the changes produced by the widespread use of
digital technologies since the last
significant study in 1988. Specifically, the group is studying how
Section 108 of the Copyright Act
(titled Limitations on Exclusive Rights: Reproduction by Libraries and
Archives) may need to be
amended to address the relevant issues and concerns of libraries and
archives, as well as creators and
other copyright holders. Information on how to participate in the
roundtables will be published in the
Federal Register later this month and made available on the Section 108
Study Group Web site:
www.loc.gov/section108 where additional information is available about
the roundtable and the
scheduled meetings.
Item #2 -- Unpublished Congressional Hearings Tally Available: Almost
every day that Congress is in
session, multiple committees hold hearings. But not every hearing, not
even every important hearing,
finds it way into print. The U.S. Congressional Bibliographies project
at North Carolina State
University has tallied the numbers of hearings held by each Senate
committee from 1993-2001, and
reported the percentage of hearings that have been published by the
Government Printing Office.
According to the tally, only 38% of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee hearings in 2001, many of
which involved confirmation hearings of Bush appointees, have been
published. Unpublished hearings
also addressed topics such as anthrax exposure (Appropriations),
aviation competition (Commerce),
"club" drugs (Narcotics), E-911 compliance (Commerce), Internet privacy
(Commerce), unsolicited
commercial e-mail (Commerce), and veterans programs (VA), observed NCSU
Social Science
Reference Librarian John A. McGeachy. For the statistical reports of
printed hearings visit:
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/congbibs/senate/ .
6. ARTICLES OF INTEREST
One posting this week: In Op-Ed writer Robert J. Samuelson's "America
By the Numbers"
(Washington Post; 18 January 2006) the author praises and summarizes
the newest edition of
Cambridge University Press's "Historical Statistics of the United
States" -- a five volume set costing
$825 that contains fascinating and illuminating numbers of interest to
historians. For the article tap into:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/17/AR2006011
700894.ht (if the link
is no longer valid, in the Post Search box that pops up after the ink
fails, type the authors name and hit
return; the article will appear).
***********************************
Who We Are...
The National Coalition for History (NCH) is a nonprofit educational
organization that provides
leadership in history related advocacy; it serves as the profession's
national voice in the promotion of
history and archives, and acts as a clearinghouse of news and
information of interest to history related
professionals. Membership in the history coalition is open to
organizations that share our concern for
history and archives. For information on how your history/archive
organization can become a member,
visit our website at http://www.h-net.org/~nch/ and click on the "Join
the Coalition" web link.
Contribute and Support this publication...
Individuals are invited to help support the NCH by sending a donation
directly to the NCH at 400 A
Street S.E. Washington D.C. 20003, or, by making an online donation at
http://www.conservenow.org/detail.asp?ORGID=2032&memflag=true. All
contributions are tax
deductible.
Subscribe Today!
We invite you to subscribe to this FREE weekly newsletter! You are also
encouraged to redistribute
the NCH Washington Updates to colleagues, friends, teachers, students
and others who are interested
in history and archives issues. A complete backfile of these reports is
maintained by H-Net on the
NCH web page at www.h-net.org/~nch/.
To subscribe to the "NCH Washington Update," send an e-mail message to
[log in to unmask]
with the following text in the body of the message (and only this text)
SUBSCRIBE H-NCH firstname
lastname, institution. To unsubscribe, send an e-mail message to
according to the following model
SIGNOFF H-NCH.
You can accomplish the same tasks by tapping into the web interface at
http:www.h-net.org/lists/subscribe.cgi and at the "network" prompt,
scroll down and select
H-NCH; enter your name and affiliation and "submit".
*************************************************************
List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance
|
