Since energy policy has been in the news most of this year, it seems like a good time to highlight this guide from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange:

Energy (Ed Herman, University of Buffalo, 2007)

Ed has produced an annotated listing of web resources to these aspects of energy:

• National Policy Issues
• US Statistics
• Technical Information
• Nuclear Energy
• New York State
• International Data
• Additional Information

Some of the specific resources he includes are:

• The Energy Source (U.S. Congress. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources)
  http://energy.senate.gov/
  The hearings and news room sections are the most informative parts of this site. These abbreviated hearings reproduce testimonies of witnesses before the full committee and the subcommittees, but exclude dialogs among the witnesses and the Committee members. The Business and Government Documents Reference Center maintains the complete hearings in paper format. The news room includes two sets of press releases issued by the Committee Chair and the ranking minority member.

• States (U.S. Department of Energy. Energy Information Administration)
  http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/states/_seds.html
  Presents energy statistics pertaining to the 50 states.

• Building Energy Codes (U.S. Department of Energy. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy)
  http://www.energycodes.gov/
  Attempts to promote improved energy codes for buildings by working with government agencies, national code organizations, and industry. It also hopes to develop and distribute compliance tools; and provide financial and technical assistance to states.

• Nuclear Power Information Tracker (Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS))
  http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/nuclear_safety/reactor-map/embedded-flash-map.html
  Select power plants from a map or a list to view a brief box that describes safety issues and a detailed statement that cites the reactor's owners, locations, populations within a 10-mile radius, and safety issues. Links lead to more detailed documentation.

• International Energy Annual (U.S. Department of Energy. Energy Information Administration)
  http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/iea/contents.html
  Provides information and trends on world energy production and consumption for petroleum; natural gas; coal; and electricity. Statistics measuring population and GDP put the data in context. View information in PDF format or download Excel files that offer longer time series.

Check out the rest of the guide. Then see what other topics are available. And if you are a documents librarian with a guide, please add your guide to the wiki!

My apologies for anyone who relied on my post "Catloging Gets Results in Alaska." Revised data has forced me to retract my claim. Please see details at http://freegovinfo.info/node/1940.

But don't be afraid to share information and new ideas. Sometimes we're going to be wrong. That's just the nature of the game. But we as a community are stronger when we share information and admit our mistakes as well as celebrate our successes.

One of the harder to find classes of government documents are declassified documents. In many cases these are not within the scope of the Federal Depository Library Program, so there isn't a centralized place to find them. Sometimes they're not actual publications, but stuff like memos, celebrity FBI files and the like. If you're researching public policy, especially national security, stuff that might be helpful might be declassified or subject to declassification under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). But before you start filing that FOIA request, check out today's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange, because what you want might already be out there:

Declassified Government Documents (UC-Berkeley, 2004) CC Last updated 9/15/2006

I really like how this guide starts out. Because the Berkeley librarians understand that declassified documents are a misty topic to most people, they start with an introduction:

About Declassified Documents

Documents may be classified for many reasons - issues of national security or privacy. A popular misconception is that when a document is declassified, it is somehow systematically made available to the public, for example, distributed to depository libraries. This is most often not the case. Exceptions to this might be

• a highly-publicized document is published as a part of an investigation. E.g. The Munson Report, a report from the fall of 1941 stemming from an intelligence gathering investigation on the loyalty of Japanese Americans is one of these exceptions. It was declassified and published as one of the many appendices in the Hearings held by the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack in 1946.
• a document series that is specifically published by the government for researchers (e.g. Foreign Relations of the U.S. or the Library of Congress Presidential Papers collections).

As there are no clear patterns of publication for most declassified documents, it falls to the researcher interested in a document that is declassified to research which agency created the document, who may have researched the document originally, and where it might be now. The guides and resources shown below are intended to assist the research in finding federal records that have been declassified as part of the routine declassification, as well as records that are declassified through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests and other kinds of investigations.

After this intro, they have additional material about the declassification process and FOIA. Then they talk about resources including:

• The encyclopedia of American intelligence and espionage : from the Revolutionary War to the present. G.J.A. O'Toole. New York : Facts on File, c1988.
  UB271.U5 O85 1988 GREF
  References individuals, committees, and operations. Many of the entries have footnotes.

• Unlocking the files of the FBI : a guide to its records and classification system by Gerald K. Haines and David A. Langbart. Wilmington, Del. : Scholarly Resources, 1993. HV8144.F43 H35 1993 GREF
• OpenNet via Department of Energy
  OpenNet includes references to all documents declassified and made publicly available after October 1, 1994. New references are added periodically as they occur. These collections include citations to several types of documents. Some have been declassified in total, and are termed "declassified." Others have had classified or other restricted information removed to produce a "sanitized" copy. The term "redacted" is sometimes used to refer to these documents.

There are a lot more. See http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/doemoff/govinfo/federal/gov_decldoc.html for details. Then check out what other subject guides are available. And if you're a docs librarian with a handout of your own, link it to the wiki!.

Because I'm a fanatic CSI fan, I just had to highlight:

Government Documents in Forensic Science (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 2002) Last updated 3/10/2008

for this week's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange. This guide brings us back to the hardworking and prolific Bert Chapman. Like most of his document guides, he opens his guide with an introductory paragraph.

Forensic science is used by government agencies for a variety of legal, investigative, and public policy purposes. These agencies are as diverse as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), other U.S. Dept. of Justice agencies, the Defense Department, and the U.S. Congress. Purdue Libraries serve as a depository of U.S. Government documents and Purdue's government documents collections are kept in many Purdue Libraries. Most government documents dealing with criminal justice are in the Humanities, Social Science, and Education (HSSE) Library.

Then he moves on to providing tangible and internet resources on this subject from the state, federal and international levels. A tiny selection of what he highlights includes:

• Handbook of Forensic Services
• Managing Death Investigation
  HSSE DOC J 1.14/2:D 39/2

• A Guide for Explosion and Bombing Scene Investigation
  HSSE DOC J 28.24/3:EX 7

• Indiana State Police Laboratory
• Israel Police-Investigations & Crime Fighting Division

The above resources are just a highlight of what's available in the guide. See it for yourself, then check out what else is available. And if you're a docs librarian with a handout of your own, link it to the wiki!.

I recently finished the book:



Theoharis, A. G. (2004). The FBI and American democracy: a brief critical history. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas.



While I won't offer a full book review here, this is a well-documented, must-read book for anyone who still believes that needless governmental surveillance of innocent citizens unconnected to criminal activities is either non-existent, an aberration of the 1960s or a creation of the Bush Administration. This sort of clearly illegal activity has been documented as going on since the 1910s, through Presidents of both parties and up to the current day. The justifications have changed. But secrecy combined with a view of dissent as treason is a solid, bipartisan tradition. It's just more obvious now.



The reason I'm highlighting this book on FGI and not my personal blog is three-fold. First, Mr. Theoharis makes note of another book he wrote that should be valuable to people researching the FBI. It is called The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide ed Athan Theoharis with Tony G. Poveda, Susan Rosenfield, and Richard Gid Powers (Phoenix: Oryx, 1999). An annotated bibliography on pages 385-396 of that book lists articles, congressional hearings, books and microfilmed collections. Second, on pages 176-178 of "FBI and American Democracy", Theoharis has provided brief biographies of all the directors of the FBI through the present.



Thirdly, in his "Note on Sources" Theoharis offers extensive notes on his use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain materials for his history. Here is an excerpt that shows both the power and limitations of FOIA (p. 179-180):

First, researchers seeking FBI files must pay processing fees of ten cents per page. Given the volume of records created since the bureau's establishment in 1908, these costs effectively preclude any individual from being able to fund the acquisition of the millions of pages of relevant FBI records. Researching the history of the FBI requires a strategy of identifying the most important and representative files.



Second, while the FBI must release all records relating to a specific FOIA request, to make such records requests a researcher must know how FBI officials created and then maintained records. A requestor can identify the files of a named individual or organization but might not know the names of special code-named programs (COMPIC, COMRAP, ABSCAM). Furthermore all records pertaining to an identified individual or organization were not all filed and indexed under that individual's or organization's name. Some were maintained in the secret office files of senior FBI officials (and most of these office files have been destroyed). Others were maintained in other files, not all of which are cross-referenced in the FBI's index to its central file system. For example, the FBI's file on the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) does not contain all records relating to the FBI-HUAC relationship. Some are extant in the FBI's files on Alger Hiss, others in the code-named COMPIC file -- and conceivably still others are included in the FBI's files on Richard Nixon, Robert Stripling, or other unknown code-named programs. Furthermore, in my effort to understand the relationship between the FBI and the Justice Department, I requested all FBI files on named attorney's general, but the released files offer limited insights. Conceivably this relationship can be understood by researching the files on both proposed and rejected prosecutions of major cases or otherwise unidentifiable files in the FBI's 66 (Administrative Matters) classification.

Another challenge identified by Theoharis is the apparent capriciousness in releasing materials:

"Having filed multiple FOIA requests, I have been struck by the variances in processing of the same report included in different files -- having information withheld in one case but not in another."

It seems like it shouldn't be this difficult and expensive for citizens to learn about their government's activities. But at least we're able to chip away at government abuses with FOIA.

Because they've been in the news, I'm highlighting the Georgia and Russia country guides produced by the Government Publications Library at the University of Colorado at Boulder, that have just been posted to the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange.

Both guides are broken down into the following sections:

• Government (direct from country) Information
• Country Profiles
• Articles & Databases
• Diplomatic Relations
• Health
• Peacekeeping & Military Information
• Resources in the Catalog
• Related Topics

I believe these guides will be of use to anyone interested in background to the current conflict. I suspect it could be a boon to any middle-school and higher grade history class.

So check out the guides above. Then see what else the Handout Exchange has to offer. If you're a docs librarian with a resource guide, share it by linking it to the Exchange.

While searching at the USGS Publications Warehouse, I noticed one of the available tabs was MIA.

Clicking on this tab brought me to the MIA Publication page, where USGS asked the public's help in tracking down missing publications. Here's their explanation:

Listed below are all the USGS series that are currently or will soon be loaded into the Publication Warehouse. Each series may have missing report numbers or unverifiable citations.

Missing report numbers are gaps in the numbering sequence of a series. We do not know if the report was ever released or if there is a reason why the report number was skipped. These reports may have been cancelled, recalled, or destroyed. Report numbers may have been issued in blocks and some may never have been used.

Unverified citations Unverified citations are citations for any publication where there was some information about the publication available but that information could not be confirmed, the publication itself has not been found, and we are not sure if the publication was actually released. Many of the unverified reports were found referenced by other publications as "in press".

Please visit the site for a list of the missing and help out if you can. You'll be responsible for putting more government information on the web.

This week's "Guide of the Week" from the GODORT Handout Exchange is:

Government Documents for Anthropologists (Word file) (Jennie Burroughs, University of Montana, 2008) CC

Like a number of guides in the Handout Exchange, this guide was created for a college course. Because people, including government scholars, have been writing about anthropology for a long time, it has a mix of print and electronic sources including:

--------------

Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology
Call number: SI 1.33:

A monographic series published irregularly.

American Memory Collection
URL: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/

The Library of Congress is building an extensive digital library collection. The American Memory collection includes a wide variety of materials: photographs, correspondence, manuscripts, sound recordings, motion pictures, etc. Folklife materials are included in this digital collection.

NARA 1930 Census
http://1930census.archives.gov/
The 1930 Census is the most recent Census to become available to the public. NARA has an online database that can help you to identify the microfilm roll you need. Then, take that roll number to the microfilm drawers (call number: 312.0973 U58p 1930) to find the relevant reel.

General Land Office Records & Maps - The Bureau of Land Management has created a Federal Land Patents Database that allows you to search for General Land Office grants issued between 1820 and 1908. You can perform a basic search, where you can search by state and patentee name, or a standard search, where you can search by patentee name, by a particular location (described by county, section, township, range, etc.), or by date and land office. http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/

-------------

The CC next to the guide name above means that this particular guide is available for noncommercial copying and adaptation if the original author is cited as stipulated under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. So as long as you provide credit to Jennie Burroughs, you could change her library's call numbers to your own, and print out as many handouts for your students as you like.

The above resources are just a highlight of what's available in the guide. See it for yourself, then check out what else is available. And if you're a docs librarian with a handout of your own, link it to the wiki!

For those who are interested in what I learned at Reference Renaissance, please visit http://alaskanlibrarian.wordpress.com/category/rr2008/, where you can find all of my session writeups.

I didn't cross post here because I think most of what I picked up was out of scope for FGI. But a few themes from the conference that I think worth mentioning here are:

• Librarians must support patrons as content creators in addition to supporting them as content users.
• Reference (including document reference) needs to move from supplying stacks of documents to providing more targeted information, along with providing context.
• Librarians must continue to find non-traditional venues to be where information users are.

I was fortunate to meet several current and past documents librarians while in Denver. If any of them are reading this entry, please chime in with your own impressions of the relevance to Reference Renaissance to government information specialists.

While we are a nation of citizens, we are also a nation of consumers. Every patron we have is a consumer and so all of them may have need for our current "Guide of the Week" from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange:

Consumer Issues and Advocacy (Mary Finley, California State University-Northridge (CSUN), 2004) Last updated 1/10/2008

Mary Finley has put together an information guide broken down into sections on Books / Complaint Guides & Consumer Agencies / Business Addresses / Brandnames / Journal Articles / Newspapers / Government Agencies & Activities / Laws and Regulations / Internet.

Many of the print resources listed in this guide can be found close to you either by searching the catalog of your local library or by searching on WorldCat.org. Ms. Finley's guide references online databases that CSUN has paid for the use of their students and faculty. Some of the same databases might be available to you. Check out the Indiana State Library's listing of statewide virtual libraries at http://www.in.gov/library/inspire/other_states.html to see what desktop database access you might have.

Check out the guide. Then see what else is available. And if you're a docs librarian with a handout, please share it!

In the Summer 2008 issue of Dttp: Documents to the People, Kris Kasianovitz has a thoughtful overview of copyright of state and local documents and how that interacts with efforts to digitize such documents.

The article:

Why Care About Copyright? by Chris Kasianovitz. Dttp, v.36, no. 2, Summer 2008, p. 12

Gives a history of state/local copyright and argues that for history's sake and on the principle of free access to government information, copyright law ought to be amended to give state and local gov't documents the same public domain status as federal documents. We at FGI are in hearty agreement with that!

As far as I can tell, Kris' article is not freely available on line, but some of the history she covers is also available on our government copyright page at http://freegovinfo.info/copyright.

The whole Summer 2008 Dttp is well worth the read. There is also a freely available web supplement that you should check out at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/DttP_Supplements_v36_n2 if for no other reason than that FGI's own James Jacobs has an article on using del.icio.us for government documents.

A week from today, I (Daniel) will be attending the Reference Renaissance conference in Denver. If you're attending, let's talk. If there's enough of us, maybe we can do a meal or something.

I'm attending for my library and I'm mostly looking for ways to better serve our large number of remote users. But I'm sure there'll be something that can be put to documents use. Assuming there is, I'll do my best to blog about it here.

Do you know your SIC from your SITC? Do you know where to find foreign trade statistics? How about where to look up an unfamiliar term from international trade? Let this week's ALA GODORT Handout Exchange guide help you:

International Trade (Ed Herman, University of Buffalo, 2007) CC

This guide is part annotated bibliography and part explanation of different trade classification schemes. It is broken down into the following areas:

Background Information for Foreign Trade
Trade Classifications
Trade Statistics-United States
Trade Statistics-States
Trade Statistics-Other Countries
Background Data About Foreign Countries
Trade Barriers
Trade Treaties, Laws, and Regulations
Key Government Agencies Supporting Foreign Trade

The CC next to the guide name above means that this particular guide is available for noncommercial copying and adaptation if the original author is cited as stipulated under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. So as long as you provide credit to Ed Herman, you could change his library's call numbers to your own, and print out as many handouts for your students as you like.

Check out the rest of this guide. Then see what else is available. Are you a librarian with a govdocs handout to share? Add your handout to the Exchange Wiki by either linking your handout to the wiki or typing the handout into the wiki. Need help? Ask Daniel at dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net.

As part of the fruit of the ALA GODORT State and Local Documents Task Force's State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project, I used the project blog to create a listing of state-level campaign finance databases.

So far I've got nine states: Alaska, Alabama, Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada and Ohio. Do you know of other state campaign finance databases? Either leave a comment below of drop me a line at dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net.

And if you use any of the databases listed above, I'd really love to see your comments on the project blog entry for that database.

There are few things more complicated than the US federal budget process. This week's guide:

U.S. Government Documents: The Budget Process (Jerry Breeze, Columbia University, 1999) Last Updated sometime in 2008

Can help you untangle the fiscal knots that is the United States Budget. This selective guide points to information about the current budget, including state by state budget impacts as well as historical data and background materials.

This guide also has a federal budget calendar which can help you see when different budget publications becomes available. Finally, Jerry provides a section on News and Commentary which draws from non-governmental sources.

The next time you are faced with a concerned citizen or a student writing about an aspect of the US budget, point them to this guide. Then see what else is available from the Handout Exchange. Don't see the subject you're looking for? If you're a documents librarian why not research the subject yourself, put a guide together and link that to the Exchange? Or build a guide on the Exchange wiki itself?