Transparency News 12/29/17

A major undertaking over at the Suffolk Circuit Court Clerk’s office promises to further move the way the office does business into the 21st century. The office recently started a project to digitize all of the court’s records dating back to 1866. The project is estimated to take more than a year. Clerk Randy Carter said the old books in which land records and other such needs are kept are tedious. “There’s a better way of doing it,” he told a News-Herald reporter this week. Once the project is complete, folks will be able to access the records online, saving time and being helpful to title examiners and researchers, as well as land owners who just need the records.
Suffolk News-Herald

If you want to find out what contracts your local government has with private companies or environmental assessments of community sites, for example, you have a Michigan law on your side: The Freedom of Information Act. The 40-year-old measure requires local governments – as well as state agencies, school districts, public universities and other public bodies – to make records available. That means if you want to see, for example, construction permits issued for a house you’re considering buying, you can ask the municipality to let you see them or to make copies for you. But what information each community shares online about the law – popularly known as FOIA – isn’t the same in southeast Michigan, nor is the process for using it. The law does not require that municipalities put FOIA information online, but open government advocates say it’s what’s expected by today’s citizens of the digital world.
WDET

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio had to be pressured to expand his national progressive platform in 2015 — or risk the loss of critical support from advocates — to include Social Security expansion, debt-free college and dealing with mass incarceration, according to newly released emails. The emails were obtained under a Freedom of Information Law request seeking communications between the mayor’s office and John del Cecato of AKPD — one of the five so-called “agents of the city” who acted as private advisers to the mayor.
New York Post

For the past six years, the Library of Congress has been collecting every single tweet that's been published on Twitter. Celebrity feuds, political campaigns and mundane "here's what I had for lunch" tweets have all been scrupulously archived. But now, the Library of Congress says it'll stop trying to cover the entire platform. The LOC simply said that it isn't prepared to collect every single tweet anymore due to some of Twitter's recent changes, such as the adoption of embedded images and video, as well as support for longer tweets. Nor does it see itself as a "comprehensive" collector, it said.
Culpeper Star-Exponent