Read Online Bearing Witness by Michael A. Kahn - Free Book Online Page B

government procurement invitation and contract award over $25,000. Printed on flimsy yellow paper by the U.S. Government Printing Office, each edition is 40 to 70 pages long and contains anywhere from 500 to 1,000 notices. The first two-thirds of every issue lists projects open for bids, that is, “U.S. Government procurement invitations.” Each invitation is set out in a dense, eye-glazing block of small type, ten to twenty invitations per page, thirty or more pages worth per issue—everything from an invitation for a bid to construct a new pier at the U.S. Coast Guard Station in Surfside, Texas, to an invitation for a bid to conduct a study of krill demographics in Antarctica for the National Marine Fisheries Service. At the back end of each issue are ten or so pages of winners, or “Contract Awards.” These were set out in even smaller clumps of type, thirty to forty announcements per page.
    To make matters worse for us, there was no connection between the procurement invitations at the front of the issue and the contracts awarded at the back. Indeed, the bids submitted in response to one of those invitations would not be awarded (and reported) until months later. And as a final maddening twist, there was no cumulative index, and thus no way to correlate the contract announced as open for bid in, say, the August 12 issue with the contract award announced two or four or six months later.
    Frankly, I felt guilty even mentioning the project. After all, my volunteers had already saved me hours and hours of monotonous work. The next task—essentially searching for one hundred forty-eight needles in a humongous haystack of back issues—would involve far more hours of mind-numbing tedium. It was the equivalent of handing them ten years’ worth of Manhattan telephone directories and a list of one hundred forty-eight telephone numbers (just numbers, no names), each of which appeared only twice over the ten years, and asking them to find the match for each number.
    â€œDamn,” Benny said, shaking his head, “this could take weeks.”
    â€œNot necessarily,” Josh said, studying the small print on the cover page of one issue.
    If the information reported in the Commerce Business Daily , he explained, was also available in a computer database on the Internet, they might be able to do the search far quicker than it would take to do manually. By way of analogy, the full text of the plays of William Shakespeare is available in an Internet database. To find the exact location of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in the “hard copy,” you’d need to leaf through the play, page by page, skimming the dialogue in each scene. To find that same text in a computer database, you’d type “To be or not to be,” press Search, and in seconds your screen would light up with the entire soliloquy from Act III, Scene 1.
    Perhaps, Josh explained, they could conduct the same type of search through the Commerce Business Daily database. By entering the contract number, they might be able to pull up the original procurement invitation and the subsequent contract award for each of the one hundred forty-eight bids without having to look through any documents.
    ***
    The phone rang.
    It was Zack calling from the library to fill me in on their progress. When I hung up, I turned toward Benny and said, “These kids are terrific.”
    He looked up from an issue of Commerce Business Daily and beamed. “Of course they are. I picked them. What’s the word?”
    â€œThey’re on a computer over at Wash U, and they found a Web site covering almost forty years of issues. He says they’ll have the result no later than tomorrow.”
    â€œWhoa.” Benny raised his eyebrows, impressed.
    I gave him a thumbs-up. “If that works, Kayla has an idea for another search. They’ll bring all the results to my mom’s house tomorrow night.”
    Jacki came in with the typed