"In what is being characterized by subordinates as an act of "managerial dementia," the Director of the Congressional Research Service this week prohibited all public distribution of CRS products without prior approval from senior agency officials."
- http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2007/03/crs_clamps_down_on_public_dist.html
- http://freegovinfo.info/node/1036
- http://www.resourceshelf.com/2007/03/24/another-salvo-in-the-war-against-public-distribution-of-congressional-research-service-reports/
- the CRS memo: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/crs032007.pdf
I just... I can't... I'm overwhelmed.
What with last week being Spring Break, I hadn't caught on to this important bit of news until today (NPR, why didn't you tell me?!), and now I'm just in shock. Infuriated shock.
I hardly even know how to communicate my feelings about this. I have a student worker who helps gather CRS reports for our archive, and who loves them as much as I do, and we're both just shocked and mad and at a loss. This is a major part of my job--identifying, capturing, and uploading CRS reports to our online archive. This is my job--ensuring that the public has permanent access to this significant government information, which they paid for. And it's not just my job--it's my mission, my passion as a librarian and more specifically as a government documents librarian, to serve the people and preserve information.
My job just got a lot harder.
If you'd like to freely browse CRS reports on all topics that have already been captured by conscientious members of the GovDocs community, check these links:
- UNT's CRS Report Archive
- OpenCRS.com
- Federation of American Scientists
- National Library for the Environment
- Foreign Press Centers, Department of State
- National Agricultural Law Center
- Thurgood Marshall Law Library (University of Maryland School of Law)
- IP Mall at Franklin Pierce Law Center
- Center for Democracy & Technology
- MPIT Terrorism Information Center
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