This – what you are reading at this moment – is a report about a report about reports. Specifically, it’s about the official report that the state of Texas requires about all the reports it requires from its own agencies.
The 2009 edition delivers 580 pages of tidy bureaucratic reading (including six pages that identify themselves as “intentionally left blank”). That’s 84 fewer than the previous edition.
Called Required Reports Prepared by State Agencies and Institutions of Higher Education (Fiscal Year 2009), the tome is compiled by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. It took over the task from the State Comptroller of Public Accounts.
The library and archives people seem a bit startled at their newly adopted baby….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.