Central Intelligence Agency

Central Intelligence Agency, the United States.
The recently enhanced public website of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contains many documents, reports, videos, and other information created or released for public dissemination.

A substantial number of declassified documents are available here in addition to information and news items about the CIA and its various offices. The Offices section profiles the various sections of the CIA and their missions, e.g., the National Clandestine Service and the Directorate of Intelligence. There is also a Kids' Zone section, with games, puzzles, and other information for children, divided by age group, lesson plans, and parental information for adults. The Library, the largest part of the site, contains links to unclassified material such as references sources, reports, historical publications, and maps.

Prominent among these are the CIA's most popular titles, such as The World Factbook and the Chiefs of State and Cabinet Members of Foreign Governments, and the Studies in Intelligence journal.
The Library also contains the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Electronic Reading Room, the Kent Center Occasional Papers, and a Video Center. One can find thousands of declassified reports and documents via the FOIA reading room and the historical publications section. For example, in the "Frequently Requested Records" section is "Francis Gary Powers: U-2 Spy Pilot Shot Down by the Soviets," which contains more than 80 declassified documents relating to the incident.
Another sample collection, "An Underwater Ice Station Zebra" recounts a 1972 salvage attempt to reclaim a crashed photoreconnaissance satellite "bucket." Released materials about the incident include links to the CIA Flickr stream and the Naval Undersea Museum.

The CIA website offers a very rich assortment of primary documents related to the CIA, US intelligence operations, and the Cold War. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels of users.
Reviewed by: C. A. Sproles, University of Louisville, for American Library Association's Choice, Nov 2013
and check the TCC Library collection for books, ebooks, videos and other resources about the CIA

USDA Economic Research Service

With the mission "to inform and enhance public and private decision making on economic and policy issues related to agriculture, food, the environment, and rural development," the Economic Research Service has extensive responsibilities. The ERS, the primary source of economic information and research within the US Department of Agriculture, collects and provides statistics to be used by farmers, researchers, and the greater population.

In accordance with its goal to inform, the ERS produces vast amounts of regularly updated reports, market analyses, research, outlooks, economic briefs, and data products, along with numerous articles, congressional studies, and a monthly magazine. Documents are freely accessible online through a variety of access points.
Reviewed by K. Monks, University of Idaho, in Oct 2013 issues of ACRL's Choice.

Newspaper Pictorials.

The Library of Congress American Memory project is a stunning collection of rotogravures taken fromThe War of Nations and original editions of The New York Times and The New York Tribune from 1914 to 1919. The rotogravure process gave daily urban newspapers high-quality images that had previously been found only in weekly papers or periodicals. Essays about the rotogravure process and photographs as propaganda add knowledge and perspective to this impressive collection of words and pictures. Date and title searching is enabled, and a detailed 1914-19 time line outlines the crucial war years. In addition to photographs from the frontlines of WW I, images from the home front captured day-to-day life in North America, the latest fashions sported by society girls, women holding down jobs in industries to support the war effort, and suffragists campaigning for the right to vote.

During the World War I era (1914-18), leading newspapers took advantage of a new printing process that dramatically altered their ability to reproduce images. Rotogravure printing, which produced richly detailed, high quality illustrations—even on inexpensive newsprint paper—was used to create vivid new pictorial sections. Publishers that could afford to invest in the new technology saw sharp increases both in readership and advertising revenue.
The images in this collection track American sentiment about the war in Europe, week by week, before and after the United States became involved. Events of the war are detailed alongside society news and advertisements touting products of the day, creating a pictorial record of both the war effort and life at home. The collection includes an illustrated history of World War I selected from newspaper rotogravure sections that graphically documents the people, places, and events important to the war. This work is recommended for students of US history, early-20th-century popular culture, mass communication, and journalism. Summing Up: Recommended. Undergraduate collections. Reviewed by Abbott, University of Evansville, for ACRL's Choice, Oct 2013/