Licenses for the following professional fields can be accessed through the Department of Consumer Affairs web site:

• Accountants and Professional Fiduciaries
• Acupuncturists and Naturopathic Medicine Providers
• Architects and Landscape Architects
• Athletic Commission Licensees
• Automotive Services
• Barbering and Cosmetology Licensees
• Behavioral Sciences
• Cemetery and Funeral Services
• Contractors, Engineers and Land Surveyors
• Court Reporters
• Dentists and Dental Hygienists
• Electronic and Appliance Repair
• Geologists
• Medical Professions, including Physicians, Pharmacists, Chiropractors, Physical Therapists, Occupational Therapists, Osteopathic Physicians, Podiatric Medicine, Respiratory Care
• Hearing Aid Dispensers, Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology
• Home Furnishings
• Optometry, Registered Dispensing Opticians and State Board of Guide Dogs for the Blind
• Psychiatric Technicians and Psychology
• Registered Nursing, Physician Assistants and Midwives
• Security and Investigative Services
• Structural Pest Control
• Veterinary Medicine

The database can be searched by inputting one or more of the following fields:

• Case number
• Last name
• First name
• Date of birth
• Date of injury
• Address
• City
• Zip code
• Employer name

Results for each query are listed in a table with the following information:

• Last name
• First name
• Case number
• Date of injury
• Employer name
• Case status
• Next hearing date

It is important to note that the EAMS database reports exact matches only (i.e., doesn’t account for name or spelling variations or mistakes.)  For example, if an employer’s name can be reported as “Corp.” or “Corporation”, you will have to search all possible permutations of the company’s name to ensure you have conducted a comprehensive search.  Read some additional tips for effective searches here.

Also keep in mind that once a case is closed, it disappears from the system entirely.  While this prevents easy searching, it shouldn’t prevent you from putting in a public records act request for a case if you know one existed.

Salary information has always been a public record available upon request from local governments, and some already publish this information online.  The Controller’s website disclosure will however, create the first searchable statewide salary database.

Read more about the salaries paid to public employees in Bell here and here.

A new restaurant grading system took effect in New York in July 2010, amending inspection criteria and replacing the previous numerical scoring system.  However, the health department’s website continues to report scores awarded prior to July 2010.  These scores are inconsistent with recent scores because they were recorded under different guidelines, and, according to restaurant owners, can potentially mislead uninformed consumers.  Additionally, overall scores are reported for each inspection date but the specific violations incurred are not provided.

From the public records perspective, the improved database also opens up additional data for searching and offers new ways to search both old and recently posted data.   This isn’t new data.  This is data that has existed all along in department systems but that previously wasn’t available for search over the web.  This is not to say that it wasn’t available to those who asked for it.  And, that’s the point:  In order to conduct thorough and complete searches of government provided data, it is often required that the researcher make a call or file a secondary public records act request asking that data otherswise unavailable for public search be canvassed.

This approach is true of many other public records databases, such as professional licensure records.  For example online resources will list date of licensure, but materials such as related credentialing test scores or applications are not usually provided.  Similarly, a current licensure status is listed, but a history of licensure status is not typically reflected online.

Also good to know: Original records are sometimes released to third party developers who can use them to create independent applications.  We have previously discussed two applications that incorporate restaurant inspections:

• CleanScores.com
• EveryBlock

From a public records research standpoint, a couple of things to keep in mind:

1.  A lawsuit doesn’t have to be as interesting as this one to contain documents or references to documents that help answer the question being pursued by the researcher.  What is “interesting” about the records will be dictated by the context in which the researcher is pursuing a question.  Methodologically, this argues for a comprehensive look at litigation (filings and attached exhibits) involving all research subjects.

2.  In trade disputes, it is not uncommon for portions of the public file to be placed under seal by a judge’s order.  In many locations, the sealed and public portions of a file are stored together.  Keep this in mind when reviewing case files.  Poor records storage or segregation is not an excuse for violating an order of the court.

Executive

• The Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents (January 2009 - present), preceded by the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (1993 - January 2009)

• Economic Report of the President (1996 - present)

• Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (1991 - present)

• State of the Union and Inaugural Addresses (1992 - present)

• Publications submitted to the President’s office by government bodies such as the Bureau of Land Management, Department of the Interior and Education Resources Information Center

• Unified Agenda (1994-present)

• Government Budget (Fiscal Year 1997 - present)

• Privacy Act Issuances (1995 - 2009)

• Current and previous editions of the US Government Manual (1995 - present)

• Code of Federal Regulations (1996-present)

• Federal register (1994-present)

Judicial

• GPO Access refers users to the US Supreme Court for recent decisions, but Supreme Court decisions are available from 1937 - 1975 and 1992 - 2000

• US House Committee on the Judiciary hearings (1995 - present), prints (1997 - present), calendars (1991 - present) and publications (2005 - present)

• Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearings (1991 - present), Supreme Court nomination hearings (1971 - present), calendars (1999 - present) and reports (1997 - present)

• Annual editions and supplements of the US Constitution (1992 - present)

Legislative

• House Calendars (1995 - present) and Senate Calendar of Business (1995 - present)

• Congressional committee materials, hearings (1995 - present), prints (1997 - present) and various subject-specific reports written by committees

• Congressional Documents (1995 - present), which includes House Documents, Senate Documents, Senate Executive Documents and Senate Treaty Documents

• Congressional Reports (1995 - present), including House Reports, Senate Reports and Senate Executive Reports

• Debates and proceedings in the Congressional Record (1994 - present) and House Journal (1991-1999)

• Independent counsel reports and investigations (1998 - 2002)

• History of bills with summaries and statuses (1983 - 2010) and all published versions of bills (1993 - present)

• Conference reports (current Congress)

• Public and Private Laws (1995 - present)

• Statutes at Large (2003 - 2009)

• US Code (1994 - 2006 editions)

• Congressional rules, procedures and handbooks

The web site also has a Federal Depository Library Locator.  With almost 1,250 locations nationwide to disseminate information free of charge, these libraries house similar documents and resources to those available online through GPO Access and may have the record you need if it predates the online content.

The CFPB will be an autonomous bureau in the Federal Reserve and its $500 million budget will be financed by the Federal Reserve rather than by Congressional appropriation.  Each CFPB director will be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate to serve a five year term.  The governance of a single director will allow the bureau to act quickly in the event of a crisis, and the first CFPB director will have particularly wide authority as he or she will be responsible for refining the bureau’s mission and initial priorities as well as drafting its initial set of consumer protection rules and enforcement procedures.  Most CFPB employees will be transferred from existing agencies, including the Federal Reserve’s consumer affairs division, Federal Trade Commission, Comptroller of the Currency’s office and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

As a government entity, the CFPB will be subject to the Freedom of Information Act and will create a new set of public records.  Since transparency is one of its main goals, we can expect the bureau to release the majority of its records as they are created.  To learn more about how the CFPB will operate and the bill itself, read these articles from the Wall Street Journal and CNN, or click here for a PDF of the full text of HR 4173 as passed by the Senate and the House.

The Internet Archive is intended as a resource for researchers, scholars and the general public.  While some basic computer programming knowledge is required to access the materials, the following types of information are available from its web site:

The Wayback Machine (archived web pages)

The Internet Archive’s most extensive collection is the Wayback Machine, which is a catalogue of more than 150 billion web pages published online since 1996.  After entering a specific web address in the search box, users may view that web page on any date that it was recorded in the archive.  Searching archives for “nytimes.com,” for example, returns 1,316 screenshot results archived since 1996.  The “compare dates” feature enables users to select pages from two different dates and view them together for changes.  The advanced search narrows the query to a specific date or range of dates for a web address, but a keyword search has not yet been developed.  Pages can be saved as screenshots, or sent to an external service to convert the pages to PDF format.

Several collections of aggregated web pages related to a single topic (i.e. an election year or a major current event) are available for browsing, as well as a collection that includes 2 billion pages assembled during a world wide web crawl in 2007.

Text (books, articles)

The Internet Archive houses over 2.3 million text publications, which can be viewed in a web page or saved as PDFs.  Most files can also be downloaded in specialized text formats, including EPUB, Kindle/Mobi, Daisy, Full Text or DiVu.  For more information about downloading and the available text formats, read here.

Moving images (television programs, movies, news, broadcasts, vlogs)

Many of the 292,000 video uploads can be streamed from the Internet Archives’ web site, and coding is available for embedding the videos in other web pages.  Alternatively, the movies can be downloaded as Ogg Video, MPEG1 (VCD), MPEG2 (DVD), MPEG4 (Quicktime) files.  The Internet Archive recommends VLC Media Player or Quicktime as the most compatible video players for viewing downloads.  For a sample of moving image content, there is an option to download animated GIF or thumbnail images.  More information about the Moving Image Archive is available here.

Audio (radio, podcasts, audio books, music)

The Internet Archive has aggregated more than 575,000 items in its Audio Archive.  These files can be streamed in two different M3U speeds as well as downloaded in two MP3 sizes or Ogg Vorbis format.  Again, VLC Media Player and Quicktime are suggested for listening to downloaded items.

Software (rare computer programs, games, USGS DRG maps)

The majority of the 34,000 programs available in the Software Archive come from the Tucows Software Library.  Users can view JPEG or GIF screenshots to preview software before downloading EXE and XML files to run it on a personal computer.

For more information about the Internet Archive and its resources, read here.

Recently, many newspapers have taken topline WARN Act data and used it to create searchable databases.  The San Francisco Chronicle’s WARN Act database allows users to search by layoff date, city and company name.  The Sacramento Bee’s database offers the same results (searchable by county/city or company name only) and also provides cumulative layoff totals by company name in a separate table.  Both databases contain data for layoff notices reported during 2008 and 2009.  If you are looking for data predating 2008, the California Employment Development Department (EDD) has posted reports back to 2000.

If you need more than topline data, review  detailed WARN Act filings.  The detailed filings for California provide the job titles of the affected positions, company contact information and whether the employees affected by the layoff or closure are unionized (if the employer provides this data.)  Here is a link to a detailed filing for 2010.  Keep in mind that many states, like California, publish WARN Act data on their statewide departments of labor websites.  The Michigan Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth, for example, posts WARN notices from 2000 to present.

For more information about the WARN Act, visit the Department of Labor or the California EDD.