The California Secretary of State’s office provides several different types of downloadable lists that can be useful for researchers. In this blog, we detail two such lists: behested payments and outstanding fines for candidates and committees who filed late paperwork required by the Political Reform Act.

The renowned historian Robert A. Caro has donated his personal archives - including thousands of interview transcripts, manuscripts and notebooks - to the New York Historical Society. Caro, who wrote the definitive account of former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s career, wanted to ensure that his source material would be available for future generations to analyze and learn.

Stock trading by members of Congress has been closely scrutinized following several reports of well-timed stock trades by members leading up to the financial crash that accompanied the coronavirus pandemic. Contemporary public knowledge of Congressmembers’ stock transactions has existed for less than a decade, having been instituted following the 2012 Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, which required members of Congress to report stock market activity exceeding $1,000 within 45 days of the transaction. In this blog, we discuss where to find the Periodic Transaction Reports filed by members and a recently launched site called Senate Stock Watcher, which makes it easier to navigate market transactions by Senators.

In this blog, we discuss a recent federal court ruling that is slated to compel the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and the Treasury Department to release additional details about Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan recipients. When the SBA and Treasury Dept. released data on the recipients of PPP loans in July 2020, they refused to release exact PPP loan figures, instead releasing value ranges, and only released loan-level data for borrowers that received at least $150,000 in funding, while recipients of loans less than $150,000 remained undisclosed. However, a November 5, federal court order required the SBA to release the names, addresses and precise loan amounts of all individuals and entities that obtained PPP loans, including those under $150,000, which have been estimated to account for 87% of all PPP loans.

A recent Los Angeles Times piece illustrated that while origin stories can provide powerful connections to consumers and help launch or sustain companies, these foundational narratives can also be scrutinized by critics or competitors who may latch onto inconsistencies or exaggerations to undermine a business. The lesson for company owners and those ready to launch a company is to subject your origin story to the same close scrutiny that a detractor might.

How would you figure out what a 1940s Los Angeles gas station looked like? What about a Roman gladiator’s helmet or the inside of a Cold War era submarine? When filmmakers have sought to recreate a bygone era, they have traditionally turned to research libraries to understand the nuances of a particular historical moment. In this blog we discuss the Harold and Lillian Michelson Library, a storied Hollywood institution that has been a resource to filmmakers for over 50 years, but which has recently struggled to find a home for its collection.

In this blog, we discuss a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that found the federal judiciary is overcharging for public access to online court records. The decision came in response to a 2016 class action lawsuit against the federal courts’ record keeping system, known as PACER (Public Access to Court Records), filed by the National Veterans Legal Services Program, the National Consumers Law Center, and the Alliance for Justice.

In this blog, we discuss how public records can be used to identify the individuals behind a business venture by looking at a recent expose on the e-cigarette company Puff Bar. The nonprofit news organization FairWarning utilized a variety of records - including corporate filings, litigation, trademark applications and a podcast- to shed light on Puff Bar.

In this blog, we discuss the disclosure of loan data for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and the Treasury Department. The release follows multiple calls from good government groups and politicians for transparency related to the $659 billion loan program. Researchers can now search for the names of any loan recipient who received more than $150,000, which the SBA and Treasury Department claimed accounted for “nearly 75 percent” of all loan dollars approved under the program.

Over the past few decades, libraries and archives around the world have been tackling the immense project of digitizing and indexing historical records, which ensures that records will be safely stored and enables researchers to more easily access them. In this blog, we discuss how the Arolsen Archives - the largest repository of records on the victims of Nazi persecution - have taken advantage of the unique opportunity presented by the Coronavirus lockdown to crowdsource records indexing.