Economic Research Service: Alabama Fact Sheet

The ERS (part of the USDA) has pulled together data from various government resources (Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Agricultural Statistics Service, etc.) and compiled a fact sheet for each of the 50 states.

Population, education, and economic data are broken down between urban and rural areas of the state. Data pertaining to farm characteristics, farm financial indicators, etc. is covered over a couple of years.

The Alabama fact sheet is available, with data current as of January 11, 2008.  It’s also available as an excel file, so that data can be downloaded & manipulated.   As a non-native, I found it interesting to look at some of the farm data - especially the number of farms and the number of those still owned by families.  Also, the number of women farmers looks to be on the rise [2,886 in 1992, 4,610 in 1997, and 4,821 in 2002].

Alabama State Publications

The Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH) is working on a variety of projects designed to make Alabama state publications more accessible to the citizens of this state. I am most excited about their electronic collection of Alabama State Publications. This collection contains “the State of Alabama Comprehensive Annual Financial Report and various publications from the Office of the Governor. Also included are annual reports, monographs, and periodicals from various state agencies.” All of these publications are born-digital in nature (either received in an email from the agency, or harvested from an agency web site).

Another approach that ADAH is taking to preserve web-published state documents is Archive-It, a service of the Internet Archive. This tool attempts to capture an entire agency web site, not just their publications. Visit the Archive-It collections page to see all of the different Alabama sites that are available.

(For documents librarians this is quite exciting - the state of Alabama hasn’t had much of a state publications program in the print environment, so it’s nice to see folks trying to preserve what’s published digitally!)

Recommendations of the Joint Interim Patriotic Immigration Commission

The Joint Interim Patriotic Immigration Commission issued their recommendations to the Legislature yesterday. The Commission was established by SJR 22 during last year’s legislative session, “to conduct a fact-finding study on immigration issues and to issue a commission report outlining suggestions and proposals to address the issues of illegal and legal immigration in Alabama to the Legislature, Governor, and members of the Alabama Congressional Delegation.”

The recommendations span the following categories: Federal Government, Public Education, Public Benefits, Public Health, Public Safety, Workforce, and Legal.

According to the Commission’s charge, “All meetings of the commission shall be open to the public and all documents, testimony, minutes of discussions, and other commission documents shall be made available to the press and the public.” Unfortunately I can’t find any of the documentation where they say how they arrived at these recommendations.

More coverage is available from al.com.