You are browsing the archives of July 2010.

Interesting interview with David Walls, now of the GPO and formerly of Yale University, in today’s Washington Post.

GPO Access is an online collection of federal documents that is administered by the Government Printing Office and funded by the Federal Depository Library Program. The website publishes full-text documents that are produced by the executive, judicial and legislative branches of the federal government.

After passing in the Senate yesterday, a new financial reform bill will soon be signed into law. It outlines various provisions designed to prevent another financial downturn in the United States, including the establishment of a new federal agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization working toward establishing permanent online access to digitized historical collections for future generations. It was founded in 1996 in San Francisco and collaborates with institutions such as the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian to build content. Many of the materials found on the Internet Archive were created online or intended for computer applications, making them difficult to come by in conventional libraries.

Enacted in 1988, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining (WARN) Act mandates that employers meeting certain criteria give advance notice of layoffs and plant closures. Since the WARN Act was first passed, many states have passed their own, state-specific versions of the WARN Act. Recently, many newspapers have taken topline WARN Act data and used it to create searchable databases.