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Researching FBI investigative records

I recently received an e-mail inquiry from a person interested in obtaining FBI investigative records and I thought I would post my response.

XXXX,

 

Thanks for your e-mail. Most of the research that I do is at the National Archives or Library of Congress, and while the the National Archives does have some FBI investigative records, these primarily of a historical nature http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/065.html.

 

Any more recent FBI investigative records would have to be obtained directly from the FBI, through the submission of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) records request form. Unfortunately the FBI does have the right to deny any information request, this might happen for reasons of national security or if the case remains open. Additionally, if the request is approved it can take several weeks or months to obtain records. There are a limited number of FBI documents that are available in their FOIA Reading Room, but it does not look as thought the investigative records of XXXX XXXXX in among them, http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/foiaindex.htm.

 

Here is a link to the FOIA request instructions on the FBI website, http://foia.fbi.gov/foia_instruc.htm. Beyond submitting a FOIA request, which I would be happy to do, there is little that I can do. Once the request is submitted it would go to the FBI’s in-house research staff, who would locate the records and redact any sensitive information. In my experience there is little communication between the records requestor and the records agency.

 

My suggestion would be for you to submit an online records request throught the FBI FOIA link. Most agencies will provide confirmation of your request and a number you can use to check on the request status.

 

I hope this is of help, please feel free to e-mail me or call if you have any other questions.

 

Thanks,

 

Brian Gunn

The FBI really does a great job on the Research and Information page of their website of making it easy for researchs to see what type of information is readily available to the public.

 

Update

Well it has been a few months since the end of the History 696 class, Clio Wired and I thought that I would revive this blog. I found the process of blog posting to be extremely helpful during the semester as a way to sort my thought about the topics discussed in class, and as a way to post things from outside of class that I thought might be helpful to others (or that I simply found to be interesting). This being said, I hope to derive the same benefits this semester by posting thoughts and ideas about my present classes; History 628, Immigration and Ethnicity in the U.S. and History 711, Nuclear War Crisis, 1945 – Present. I will also be posting other items relating to historical research in a general and other topics. Thanks to those who have visited this site so for, I hope that I can continue to write on subjects that you will find to be interesting or useful.

- Brian

Correction

I just realized that I used pink instead of brown in my mockups . . . The intended color was a lightish brown, this correction will be made for the final versions.

 

Thanks!

Updated Mock-ups

Alright, I worked on an update to my site entry page and also created a “home” page and one of the interior pages. Thanks to everyone who has provided comments, I am trying to incorporate as many suggestions as I can. I think that the enrty page and the “narrative” page are starting to look quite good (but then again I have been staring at them for way too long).

A few other things – many of the pictures are simply placeholders and will be changed and there will be text in the grey boxes on the narrative mockup page. Also please feel free to comment on colors/lack of colors/etc. Apparently I am color blind . . .

Thanks!

Digital Preservation

I decided to get a bit more serious about preserving my digital files just a few years ago when I started taking graduate classes. Before that time I had generally saved paper versions of articles or essays, anything digital; classwork, presentations, projects, photos, were scattered randomly on my computer or distributed among a stack of unlabeled floppy disks and CDs.

The first thing that I set out to do was think of a simple (sensible) organizational method for documents and media; a straightforward file hierarchy for all data, with supporting metadata for media files. My documents folder contains three folders; work, school, and personal. Each of these is further broken down; the school folder contains individual folders for each semester, then each class, then handouts and final project (papers remain in the main part of the folder). For digital video I break my collection down to movies, tv, and clips (for video I have shot myself).

On a work trip last year I decided to update all of the folder names and hierarchy for all of my music and digital video, I have a folder for each artist (yes, there is a miscellaneous folder) which breaks down to individual albums. I also took the time to standardize file name format and updated metadata and linked album art. It was a tedious trip and I had a lot of time . . .

As far as file format, I haven’t really run into any problems. Most of my digital video is in .AVI, my audio is all in .MP3 or .OGG, text documents are all in MS compatible formats, and pictures i keep in .TIF and .JPG. The couple of times that I have run into problems opening a particular file I have been able to find a way to convert it or have gotten a plug-in that allows me to read the file. For video the best program I have found is VLC Media Player which plays literally anything. Any digital photos that I have had trouble with I have used IRfanView. Also, for word processing I have been using OpenOffice for quite a while and it seems to have extensions for anything I could possibly want to view.

My main concern about preserving my digital files is not that I will not be able to access files, I have found that if I maintain files in popular (and in the case of pictures – multiple) formats, that I generally do not have trouble accessing data. In the cases where I have not transferred data to new formats I have found avariety of ways to up-convert the files; in a one cases even virtualizing Windows 95 to use an older image viewer. I think that software is doing a great job of meeting the needs of users to access legacy media.

The biggest problem that I have run into, and the biggest catalyst for me to upgrade hardware has been physical compatibility. Most modern devices have removable media, or connect via USB, This becomes a problem when computers begin dropping legacy connectors and media ports. Even now it is getting pretty hard to find a reader for Smart Media cards, or a computer with a serial port on the back, but many older external hard drives are connected via parallel port, most digital cameras used manufactured a decade ago used Smart Media.

A few months ago I was playing with an Apple Quicktake 150, a digital camera released prior to USB. I took several pictures with the camera, but was unable to view them (no lcd), or retrieve them from the camera (built-in eprom memory), the camera did have a port on the side which allowed users to connect the camera to a computer via parallel port. I was eventually able to track down an old server in my office that had a parallel port and connect the camera, but in a few years even that (awkward) solution might not be possible. Certainly CDs and DVDs can rot, hard drive platters can crack, and magnetic tape can degrade, but the physical components can very easily become incompatible, even with the right ports, computers need to have the correct drivers so that they know how to interpret the information.

Most of my files and media I now keep on my primary computer and on an external hard drive. Important pictures I put onto DVD as well, and the ones that I really like I print out. I keep documents in these places and on a USB flash drive so that I can carry them everywhere. I also back up all of the database files and configuration files for the program files on my computer. Also, I have started putting some files into online storage (the calender on my computer syncs with Google Calender every time I go online) and putting some pictures online. My thinking is that regardless of the technological change or natural disaster at least one storage solution will survive.

Some of the things that I have not taken the extra precaution to preserve are my personal e-mail (fingers crossed that yahoo! won’t lose it), and work e-mail (this is downloaded from a hosting server onto into Outlook). I also haven’t taken the time to preserve web based content such Facebook, IM conversations, forum correspondence, etc.

I think that I do more than some people, but my preservation scheme is certainly not perfect. Generally I have paid attention to situations where my preservation efforts have fallen short and made “system wide” changes based on this, like bulk converting image, text, and sound files, or redoing all of the files names and metadata in my music collection because my media player player refused to show the correct album art.

If everyone were to use the same file formats, and we were able to ensure the compatibility of these formats indefinitely, and if we were able to comfortably assume that connectors would always be compatible, we would still encounter the problem of physical components getting old and wearing out, just as with analog media.

Interesting blog post about future proofing data

I came across a post on Lifehacker that asks readers how they go about future proofing data on their computers (or whether they wory about it at all). Some of the responses are very interesting. One commentor asks the question, “what about timeless extensions like .txt which has lasted since 95?” It’s amazing that someone considers 13 years timeless. Most of the commentors suggest that data is best maintained through periodic and continual conversion to updated formats

The physorg.com article from which much of the post is sourced, notes that the answer may lie in the use of non-proprietary formats. It also states that several countries have mandated the use of non-proprietary file formats for all governmental use.

Interesting Image Search Engine

I just read about a recently launched image search site, Pixolu. Although the site does not work perfectly just yet (a comment from the site creator indicates that their server is having trouble with all the traffic), the idea behind it is pretty interesting; you enter a search term and it scans several image searches for matches, you can then select several images that are close to what you have in mind and it will use these to refine your search.

I was not able to find any information of how exactly the site refines the search (metadata, color, etc) but i think it will be interesting to play around with. I did a quick search for “okinawa glass” and was able to quickly refine the results down to a picture similar to that in my blog header.

Mock-up Version 2

Here is a second version of my site mock-up, thanks for all of th great comments on the earlier attempt. Several people mentioned that the background was washing out the text, that was actually a result of saving the image in the wrong format before converting it to a .GIF, the present version is closer to the look that I am hoping for. Also, I eliminated the small pic in the header and rearranged the text a bit. I may make a few more changes later, but for not I am pretty happy with how it is looking.

As the the other comments, I will be writing another post that will address these along with audience, technology, interactivity, etc. Thanks!

Comparison of Google Books and Open Content Alliance

I read a lot of stuff online, but I have never really taken the time to really look at Google Books or the online books published by the Open Content Alliance. The majority of the time I prefer a regular, bound, paper book – preferrably one that is old and dusty and dry enough to suck the moisture out of my finder tips as I turn the pages. My only experience reading an e-book was several years ago when I downloaded a pdf version of a fitness book onto my Palm Z22. At the time Palm had a PDF reader plug-in, which was pretty clunky (it may be imploved now) and forced me to scroll back and forth as I read across each page. Recently I have begun reading blog posts from my cell phone, the screen is surprisingly bright and easy to read despite the screen being so small and I have found it to be very comfortable to hold the phone as a would a regular book. For me the real downside to reading an e-book, especially one in PDF format, is the scrolling. The fact that blog posts are in an HTML format means that they can be reformatted and optomized for a small screened reader or cell phone very easily.

In reviewing the text section of Archives.org and Google Books I wanted to first look at the search interface of each repository; how easy is it to search, what information is produced by search resuly, how robust is advanced search, is the visoal layout of the site inviting or intimidating, does the site “just make sense”, and can search results be captured by Zotero or Endnote. There are other things that I noticed, but I suppose they will come up as I type.

The first thing that I noticed upon looking at each site (really two things) is that Google Books is a much better looking site and is much easier to get to. Conceptually, typing in Google.com/books or clicking on the “books” link on the google homepage makes much more sense than selecting the “text” link on Archives.org. Additionally, I search of “free books on google” or “free books on open content alliance” takes me to the homepage of each. The Google Books homepage is fairly inviting; breaking books into several categories, and offering suggestions of popular titles. The homepage for the OCA, though it has a much greater amount of information, is quite intimidating to look at. Neither offered particularly satisfying results when I used their search function to too look for full texts of the keyword “puppies”. The OCA search brought me a single hit, Naughty Puppies a nice book of childrens poetry, while the Google search delivered books of a more technical nature, with the first hit being a trade magazine which mentions canine gynecology.

The e-book that I decided to look up on OCA and Google Books is the 1921 edition of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, published by the Macmillan Company. Each site uses the scan of the document generated by Google, so it is interesting to see how each presents the document. Following my search, I selected the book on each site; on the google site I am taken to the a liveview of the book, on the OCA site I go to an about page and have to click further to get to the actual text. Each site offers (in addition to the liveview) the option of downloading the document or viewing it in an all text format like HTML. Google Books allows users to download the document in PDF format, while OCA allows visitors to download in DjVu and PDF (DjVu is a free document format similar to PDF). I could not figure out, on either site, how to download documents in HTML or plain text. The liveview on each site wass very similar, though the OCA version removes much of the navigational functionality while in this view, allowing the user to interact with the document, but forcing visitors to page back to get to the book’s about page.

In features are where the two sites really diverged. Google Books presents the text on the left side of the page with a navigational panel on the right. The navigational panel allows the user to full text search the document, jump to any section or page, write and read reviews, purchase the book, flag it as unreadable, add to “library”, go to the “about” page for the book, or look-up the book on Worldcat.org. The OCA site gives fewer options, but does provide one that is very interesting; you can purchase a printed and bound copy of the e-book.

The Google Book site also has a very nice about page; here the site lists the most cited passages in the book, and gives a diagram of the geographic locations mentioned in the book (this is an even more impressive feature when you look at a book such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne). This page also lists keyword and metadata associated with the text. 

I could go on for a long time talking about the various features of each site, search functions, quirky interface problems, etc . . but I will cut to the chase, I prefer Google Reader over Archives.org. Let me quickly explain why;

When looking up information for books I most often go to Worldcat, or Amazon (I know). Worldcat, especially, has a wonderful easy to use interface; I can quickly find exactly what I am looking for, cite it in Zotero, and figure out where I can obtain a copy of the text. There are too many features on the Archives.org website, too many links, and too much information that I am simply not going to use and all of it clutters up the screen. If I am going to look for a book I am going to look for it on a purpose built site, a site that does citations and does them well. If I want to check to see if a digital copy of a book is available I want to do so as quickly as possible, either browsing a collection or using a seach function. OCA has some nice features, but the ease of use of Google Books is a clear winner. I am also drawn to some of the interesting features that I mentioned above; the geographic information and the listing of “most popular” passages.

Google offers some surprisingly powerful feaqtures that are very well integrated so as not to intimidate users, additionally Google does not try to half-heartedly integrate academic features which are better realized in a site like worldcat.