By now, most FGI readers should know about the coup in Honduras.

You may not know that the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange has some resources to help people learn more about Honduras:

• Honduras Country Guide from the University of Colorado at Boulder Government Publications Library
• State Department microfilm documents on Latin America from the University of California at Berkeley.

While not a handout nor in the Exchange, people interested in historic interactions between the United States and Honduras should check out the cross-agency Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Search put together by Stanford University's Social Sciences Research Group and hosted by Archive-It.

Librarians - If you want to use library/govdoc resources in highlighting news stories or themes important to your audience, you don't need to work alone. The Handout Exchange is there to help.

Treaties exist between many nations on many subjects. From mutual defense to copyright to exchanging meteorological data, chances are there is at least one treaty between at least two nations on almost any subject you can think of. This week's Guide of the Week will help you navigate this crowded field:

Treaty Research: Sources and Tips (Debbi Schaubman, Michigan State University, 1999) Last updated 10/27/2006 by Terri Miller.

This guide aims to be a starting point for the most important sources to treaty finding. It is divided into five sections:

• General Bibliographies and Indexes: World Coverage
• General Bibliographies and Indexes: Regional/National Coverage
• Treaty Texts
• Treaties between Native Americans and the United States or Canada
• Tips for Tracking Recent Treaties and Treaty Actions

Some of the resources include:

• Treaties and Alliances of the World
• Canado-American Treaties
• United States Treaties and Other International Agreements
• Avalon Project: Treaties between the U.S. and Native Americans
• Texts of Recently Deposited Multilateral Treaties

In addition to Terri's guide, there are currently at least six other guides on international treaties. Explore them all at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Exchange_Subject_T#Treaties.

Anecdotes are not data. If you want data, you should turn to today's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki:

Finding Statistical Resources (Sherry Engle Moeller, Ohio State University, 2005) CC Last updated 9/6/2006

I especially like this guide because it is more than a list of statistical resources. Sherry Moeller has a whole set of questions to help guide people to the right resource. She starts out with:

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the subject of interest? (Topic)
  Examples: Crime, Economics, Education, Health

• Who or what is being counted? (Unit of Analysis)
  Examples: Individuals, Families, Households, Businesses, Farms, States, Countries

• What level of geography is desired?
  Examples: World, Country, State, County, City, Census Tract, MSA, Zip Code

• Do you want data for a single location or multiple locations?
  Examples: Ohio, Great Lakes Region by State, All U.S. States

• What time period should the data cover?
  Examples: Most recent available, 1870, 1900-1950

• What frequency of data do you need? (Are you looking for figures for a specific point in time or are you comparing data over a period of time?)
  Examples: One time, decennially, annually, monthly, daily

• What variables are of interest?
  Examples: Race, Sex, Acreage, Gross National Product

Sherry also gives this practical suggestion:

If you don't know who collected or produced the data, can you make an educated guess? (Who would need this kind of information?)
Examples: Number of airplane crashes in the U.S. - U.S. Department of Transportation?; Number of AIDS cases by country - World Health Organization?

Once she has given you some focus, Sherry's guide moves into the following sections: General Sources, International Resources, Foreign Government Resources, U.S. Government Resources, State and Local Government Resources and Other Resources. Among the many annotated resources listed are:

• Statistical Abstract of the United States
• World Development Indicators (World Bank)
• Statistical Agencies [By Country]
• Energy Information Administration (DOE)
• Statistics at the State and Local Level

The full guide is well worth your time if you have any interest in statistics whatsoever.

Aside from this guide, there are about three dozen other guides to various kinds of statistics available from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange. Go check them out at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Exchange_Subject_S#Statistics

Did you know that today (June 6, 2009), asteroid Asteroid 2004 FY15 is flying by the earth at 35 times the distance to the Moon? Or that the 52nd Session of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space is going on this week? You would have if you had spent some time exploring this week's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki:

Space and Astronomy (University of Colorado at Boulder Government Publications Library, 2008)

The events above came from the Space Calendar listed in the "US Government Information" section of the guide. This is also the section to pay close attention to if you're at all interested in highlighting Apollo Program resources in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.

Other sections in UCB's guide include: International Information, Nongovernmental Sources, Resources in the Catalog and Related Topics. Some of the resources highlighted in these sections include:

• Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
• Hubble Space Telescope Images
• Electronic resources on space exploration or astronomy from UCB Library's Chinook catalog
• Image Databases

There is a lot to explore. I hope you will boldly go and explore the rest of this guide. And if you are a documents librarians with a handout or guide, I urge you to confidently go and link it to the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki.

With North Korea once again pushing its way to the front of the headlines, this is a good time to show off a librarian produced resource guide from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki on this pariah nation:

North Korea Country Guide (University of Colorado at Boulder Government Publications Library, 2008)

Like the other excellent country guides produced by the UCB govpubs library, this guide is broken into the following sections:

• Government Information
• Country Profiles
• Articles & Databases
• Diplomatic Relations
• Health
• Peacekeeping & Military Information
• Resources in the Catalog
• Related Topics

The Government Information section indicates that the main official page for North Korea is a dot com and appears to be linked to an organization called the Korea Friendship Association. In addition there are two unlabeled portraits on the North Korea home page. I suppose they are current leader Kim Jon Il and his father Kim Il Sung. But I guess the North Korea web authors feel that only people who know that for sure will be visiting the North Korea web site.

As mentioned in other highlights of UCB country guides, the Country Profiles section features profiles of North Korea from many international organizations and a number of individual countries. If you question the impartiality of US assessments of North Korea, this section may give you a more well rounded view.

One of the resources featured under "articles and databases" is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Declassified Documents database at http://www.foia.ucia.gov/. Typing in North Korea yields 1,154 results. Some of them serious and some of them light-hearted like "Agency hosts movie premier and sneak preview" which talked about a showing of the movie In the Company of Spies at CIA headquarters. This particular document also shows the ridiculous secrecy practice by the CIA as this movie press release has a number of redactions, including this bizarre one in the following paragraph:

No visit to the agency would be complete without a trip to the [REDACTED] reports that between 9:30 and 10:55pm, guests spent 2/3 of an average day's sales, carting away cart-loads of t-shirts, caps, and infants/children's outfits.

The secret's out. The CIA has a gift shop. The redaction would look somewhat less silly and pointless if they had just redacted the gift shop manager's name.

But I digress. The good librarians at the University of Colorado at Boulder have provided a wealth of resources for anyone who wants to take a peak behind the screaming headlines of this deeply insular and often confusion producing country.

Are you a librarian with a handout or guide to an issue in the news? Then link it to the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki.

A recent event shows why free access to the federal courts' Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) is important.

That event is Chrysler's bankruptcy. This is an event of high enough interest that PACER itself chose to highlight their holdings of the Chrysler bankruptcy docket.

Perhaps highlight is too strong a word. To see anything you need a PACER account and be prepared to pay fees under these conditions (bolding mine):

Access to web based PACER systems will generate an $.08 per page charge. The per page charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, including a search that yields no matches (one page for no matches.) The charge applies whether or not pages are printed, viewed, or downloaded.

If PACER access were free, any interested citizen could monitor the bankruptcy case for themselves instead of getting a filtered view from media. They could see how the company, the shareholders and the union were being treated in the process.

PACER will continue to generate documents of national interest as GM follows Chrysler into bankruptcy court. Congress ought to mandate free access to all of PACER. The cost to do is an infinitesimal portion of the money paid for auto industry bailouts.

A fair amount of news coverage has revolved around the regulatory activity of the Obama Administration -- whether it is to keep Bush era regulations or to propose new regulatory schemes. Today's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki will help you keep the process straight and help you find regulations past and present:

Administrative Law: The Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations (Hui Hua Chua, Michigan State University, 2008)

Hui Hua's excellent guide starts out at the beginning, by explaining what a regulation is. Then she links people to four separate places that explain the complex federal regulatory process. Chances are at least one will make sense to you. Then she moves on to provide tips on searching for regulations online (1996-present) and in print.

I've worked with documents for well over a decade, but this guide taught me something new (or helped me to remember). You can get from the US Code to the Code of Federal Regulations(CFR) by using the index volume of the CFR, labeled "CFR Index and Finding Aids." The "Parallel Table of Authorities and Rules" to link a US Code Section to a section of the CFR. She also tells us what I did know, that sections of the CFR will state their statutory authority, linking us back to the US Code.

Hui Hua concludes her guide with ways to keep with proposed regulations. If your work or study touches on federal regulation in any way, you'll want to take a close look at this guide. And if you're a librarian with a guide or handout of your own, please link it to the Handout Exchange.

One of the things I think documents librarians can do to market their resources is to try and match current events to their collections.

A case in point is the current outbreak of swine influenza. Did you know that there was an outbreak in the 1970s that threatened to explode into a pandemic? Emergency supplementals were made and vaccines were rushed out into the field -- possibly too early, according to some reports.

Using a combination of WorldCat and the Catalog of Government Publications, I came up with this list of publications:

United States. (1976). Emergency supplemental appropriation bill, 1976: Hearing before a subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session ... swine influenza immunization program. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1976). Emergency supplemental appropriation bill, 1976 Swine influenza immunization program : hearings before a subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session, Subcommittee on the Departments of Labor and Health, Education, and Welfare. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1976). National swine flu immunization program of 1976: Report to accompany S. 3735. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1984). Patty Jean Tipton and her husband, Ronald Tipton: Report (to accompany S. 1488). Washington, D.C.?: U.S. G.P.O.

United States. (1976). Preventive health services and employment programs emergency supplemental appropriations Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Swine Influenza Immunization Program, Department of Labor, Community Services Administration, Public Employment and Summer Youth Programs : hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session, on H.J. Res. 890. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1976). Proposed national swine flu vaccination program: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session ... March 31, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1976). Public Law 94-380: 94th Congress, S. 3735, August 12, 1976 : an act to amend the Public Health Service act to authorize the establishment and implementation of an emergency national swine flu immunization program and to provide an exclusive remedy for personal injury or death arising out of the manufacture, distribution, or administration of the swine flu vaccine under such program. Washington: For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1977). Review and evaluation of the swine flu immunization program Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, Ninety-fifth Congress, first session ... September 16, 1977. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1978). Review and evaluation of the swine flu immunization program: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, Ninety-fifth Congress, first session ... September 16, 1977. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1976). Supplemental appropriation for production of swine influenza vaccine: Communication from the President of the United States ... March 29, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1976). Supplemental appropriation for production of swine influenza vaccine: Message from the President of the United States ... March 29, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1977). Suspension of the swine flu immunization program, 1976: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Labor and Public Health Welfare, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session ... December 17, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1977). Suspension of the swine flu immunization program, 1976: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session ... December 17, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1976). Swine flu immunization program, 1976 Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session ... April 1 and August 5, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1976). Swine flu immunization program: Supplemental hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment...Ninety-fourth Congress, second session...June 28, July 20, 23, and September 13, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1976). Swine flu immunization program: Supplemental hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

United States. (1977). The swine flu program: An unprecedented venture in preventive medicine, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare : report to the Congress. Washington: U.S. General Accounting Office].

United States. (1976). Swine flu vaccine. FDA consumer memo. Rockville, Md: U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

For a hyperlinked version of this list, please see http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/dcornwall/lists/697063/.

As far as I could tell, none of these items are currently available on the internet. So now we've not only highlighted stuff in depositories by creating and posting this list, we've made some basic metadata accessible to the web for researchers who may never visit a catalog or worldcat.org.

Finally, I'd like to point out that this list was easily compiled because we have structured databases with controlled vocabulary and the ability to easily limit by date. Try searching "swine flu 1970s hearings" on Google and see if you get authoritative results. Cataloging matters!

This week's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki will be useful in stimulating critical thinking about public policy:

Public Policy Matrix (Grace York, University of Michigan, 1999) CC Last updated 5/12/2008 - Noncommercial copying and adaptation of this guide is permitted if the original author is cited as stipulated under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License

This guide is structured differently than many of the librarian produced guides we have highlighted before. Instead of the usual list of resources with or without annotations, we have a guide that this broken down by types of questions:

WHAT'S THE PROBLEM? | WHAT'S THE SOLUTION?
LEGISLATIVE SOLUTION
Legislative Process | Influences on Legislators
EXECUTIVE BRANCH SOLUTION
Executive Branch Options | Influences on Executive Branch
MONITORING THE RESULT

For each question or type of solution, subsets of the session are offered along with resources that might answer that question. For example, for "Who is influencing Congress?" We have:

• Journal and Newspaper articles
• Political Parties
• Committee Chairmen
• Colleagues
• Congressional Hearings for Lobby Group and Executive Branch Testimony
• Executive Branch
• Interest Groups
• Campaign Finances
• Public

Along with resources that help people document these influences. At the end of the guide is an alphabetical listing of resources and an annotated list of related University of Michigan guides.

All in all, it looks like a good citizen resource despite its understandable reliance on some propriety resources. The questions and pointers are great in their own right and many free resources are included. If you have someone trying to wrap their brain around a policy problem, Grace's guide would get them asking good questions. Good questions are the first step to good answers.

Next Saturday (May 2nd) is my 17th wedding anniversary, so there will be no "Guide of the Week" next week! So you'll want to take part of your morning next Saturday to explore the Handout Exchange on your own.

Patent research is one of more obscure things one can do. It is hard enough to determine whether there is a US patent for a given invention, and today's globalized world often requires looking at international patents as well. Where to begin? One place to start is this week's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki:

Patent and Trademark Information (Univ. of California--Berkeley, 1999) Last updated 2/9/2007

This guide is divided into the following sections:

• Introduction
• Pre-1872 Patent Information
• Foreign and International Patent Information
• Other Patent Collections
• Bibliography of Patent & Trademark Sources
• CD-ROM Sources
• Internet Sources
• Step by Step Patent Research

They use a mix of print and electronic resources with varying date coverage. A small set of the resources they highlight include:

• Japan Patent Office: A searchable database of Japanese patent abstracts, which includes the patent number, title, inventor, company, and abstract of the patent.
• Foreign patents: a guide to official patent literature by Francis J. Kase. 1972.
• Code of Federal Regulations, Title 37: Patents, Trademarks and Copyrights.
• Finding List for United States Patent, Design, Trademark, Reissue, Label, Print, and Plant Patent Numbers. - Gives the volume number of the Official Gazette in which a given patent number will be found for the years 1872-1993. Includes information on earlier patents.
• Google Patent Search - Access over 7 million patents from 1790-2006. Does not currently include patent applications, international patents, or U.S. patents issued over the last few months. Includes tips for advanced patent searching.

Finally, since the librarians at Berkeley realize that no one has all the answers, they end with links to several other helpful patent searching guides:

• Searching for pre-1976 U.S. patents via University of Maine
• Patent Search Tutorial and Information via University of Texas
• The 7-Step Strategy via the U.S. Patent Office
• U.S. Patent Searching via Oregon State University

To view these guides and to check out the rest of the Berkeley patent resources, go visit this guide. And if you are a librarian with a guide of your own, please post it to the Handout Exchange.

Kudos to GPO and DLC leadership for posing a series of discussion questions for Monday's meeting in Tampa. If you haven't seen the questions yet, I urge you to visit http://fdlp.gov/component/content/article/184-gpoprojects/376-new-birth-questions and ponder them whether or not you'll be in Tampa next week.

While most of the questions are good ones, there is one question that just shouldn't be asked in 2009. It is from the questions about Regionals' management and it is:

5. For more than 15 years now, certain members of the library community and the Depository Library Council have discussed redundancy and the number of comprehensive collections of content needed to ensure permanent public access. Title 44 requires that regionals retain at least one copy of all Government publications either in printed or microfacsimile form (except those authorized to be discarded by the Superintendent of Documents). In order to consider future models that may be legally permissible as requested by the library community, should regional depository libraries be able to withdraw portions or all of their tangible collection if they have access to digital equivalents? What are the long-term implications for depository library collection responsibilities necessary to achieve the FDLP's primary goal of permanent public access to both print and digital materials?

This could have been an excellent question except for (Emphasis mine):

"should regional depository libraries be able to withdraw portions or all of their tangible collection if they have ACCESS to digital equivalents?"

Access to third party servers are not a collection and never will be. Think if this was a question for an academic library:

"Should academic libraries discard part of all of their printed journals if they have a subscription to a full text serials database?"

Or even:

"Should academic libraries discard part or all of their printed journals if these journals are currently available freely over the web?"

Who wants to be holding the bag in five to seven years when the publisher goes out of business or charges more than you can afford? Will you be the one to explain the empty serials stacks to your faculty?

Neither I nor my likeminded colleagues are against digital materials. But we insist on custody. The question that SHOULD be discussed in Tampa is:

"In order to consider future models that may be legally permissible as requested by the library community, should regional depository libraries be able to withdraw portions or all of their tangible collection if they HOLD LOCAL COPIES of digital equivalents?"

My answer to that question is an enthusiastic YES! For example, if a Regional is currently participating in the USDOCS LOCKSS PLN that is caching the content of GPO Access around the country, then they (subject to changes in Title 44) should be allowed to discard their tangible holdings that correspond to what has been stored in their LOCKSS boxes. That way even if Congress mandates fee-based access next year, that Regional will still have copies of their digital materials for patrons to access over the web.

With apologies to Stanford, the local copy doesn't have to be based on the LOCKSS model, but it should be a server located at the Regional or its parent institution. The server should be capable of serving content over the internet.

The ALA GODORT Handout Exchange has librarian-produced guides using resources from every level of government, from international to local. Today's guide is a case in point:

Official Links for Los Angeles City and Los Angeles County (Mary Finley, California State University-Northridge, 2008)

This guide is broken up into six sections:

• Official Links: City of Los Angeles - Los Angeles County
• Directories and Guides: Services & Help - Business Assistance - Transportation - Education & Culture
• L. A. City/County Statistics & Facts: Economic/Demographic - Crime - Environment - Education - Health - Other - Budgets
• Election Issues & Results
• Politicians: Who represents you? - Contact the politicians - Lobbyists and Campaign Contributions
• Local Codes and Regulations

I am particularly impressed with the "statistics and facts" section as it draws Los Angeles related information from several levels of government. Sources here include:

• American FactFinder (Census Bureau)
• Airport Passenger Boarding and All-Cargo Data (Federal Aviation Administration) - Reports include data on several Los Angeles area airports.
• California Department of Finance - Site includes demographic as well as financial and economic data.
• Residential Vacancy Data (City of Los Angeles Housing Dept.)
• Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services Statistics - Statistical reports, caseload characteristics, and various research reports about social assistance programs and welfare reform from the Research, Evaluation and Quality Assurance Division of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services.

When you take all of the linked resources together, there are dozens of them. So if you have any interest in Los Angeles or large urban areas, go check out Mary Finley's guide.

Are you a librarian with a guide to local government information? Then post a link to the Handout Exchange. Don't know of a guide to your area? Then go create one. Your patrons and your peers will thank you.

For historic background and access to current foreign policy information, try this week's "Guide of the Week" from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki:

Government Documents on U.S. Foreign Policy (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 1999) Last updated 3/10/2008

Bert truly starts his guide at the beginning with The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (6 vols.) and moves on to such current resources such as:

• Foreign Consular Offices in the U.S.
• United States Contributions to International Organizations
• Legislation on Foreign Relations Through (year)
• Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba
• European Union "Common" Foreign and Security Policy

There's a lot to wander through. So please go wander. And if you're a documents librarian with a handout of your own, please post it to the Handout Exchange Wiki!

According to Secrecy News, the Army has pulled the unclassified Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin from the open web:

The former MIPB website states that “The MIPB is now being hosted on the Intelligence Knowledge Network (IKN). (AKO account required).” AKO (Army Knowledge Online) accounts can only be obtained by military and contractor personnel.

The MIPB, which is unclassified, has long been available on the world wide web and has even been sold commercially. Back issues from 1995 to 2005 are available online from the FAS website, though no longer from the Army.

In addition to being sold commercially, this journal was also distributed through the Federal Depository Library Program until 2006, according to its entry in GPO's Catalog of Government Publications at http://catalog.gpo.gov. After 2006, it went online only and access was through a PURL.

As of today, that PURL directed folks to the takedown page. Libraries that depended on the "official repository" of the Army for post-2005 issues were out of luck. If these digital copies had been instead deposited to depository libraries, access might have gone on unhindered. Unless the Army had asked GPO to have depositories destroy their electronic archives of MIPB. But even then, the fact that multiple digital copies of MIPB existed would have triggered GPO's public process laid out in ID 72: Withdrawal of Federal Information Products from GPO’s Information Dissemination (ID) Programs. With that public process and the fact that prior issues were widely available, I think that the MPIB archive would have been safe. Instead, the Army as "The Official Repository" has made the online archives go away until FAS gets its FOIA request responded to.

Or maybe it will come sooner. The fact that MPIB had a PURL indicates that GPO may have been archiving it. But can they now post their copy of the archive? Do they need to consult the Army first? What if the Army says no?

Has anyone contacted GPO Help on this issue yet? What kind of a response have you gotten? Be sure to be kind to GPO as the decision on documents withdrawals rests with the agency. In this case, the Army. Don't blame Ric Davis if the Army nixes an FDLP restoration of the 2005-2009 MIPB archive.

It's cases like these where decisions are made with a flip of the switch without a public process that makes us wary of the Official Single Repository of Federal Publications, no matter who the federal agency is. Sunlight and good decision making require digital deposit outside the federal government.

If you want a quick way to find International Government Organizations or their publications, start with today's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki:

International Documents Collection (Northwestern University Library, for the GODORT International Documents Task Force, 2008)

Northwestern is attempting to keep a comprehensive list of International Government Organizations (IGO) that maintain a web presence.

They currently list many IGOs from the African Development Bank to the World Tourism Organization (WTO). To facilitate access to the publications and other IGO information, the guide maintains a Google Custom Search Engine.

Northwestern staff use the following criteria to add IGOs to their list:

Criteria used to maintain the Northwestern University Library IGO list:

• The primary audience for the site is the Northwestern University community.
• The international organizations included in the list are intergovernmental organizations (IGOs).
• International Documents staff intend the list to be comprehensive. They include all the IGOs of which they are aware. However, an IGO must have a web page to be included in the list. If any person recommends an IGO to add to the list, staff add it to the list.
• The list links to sites in English, when available.
• In general, the list links only to the main page (i.e. welcome or home page) of the IGO's web site. The list links to web pages that are located within an IGOs web site if:
  • it is the web page of the IGO's statistical division or statistical publications.
  • it is the web page of the IGO's publications, if there are a substantial number of full-text publications available there.
  • it is a web page that is often used.
  • it is a web page which had been used by staff or a patron as a source of information, but which is extremely difficult to locate using the site's navigation functions.
• If you have any questions or suggestions please email them to mailto:govinfo@northwestern.edu.

While I think this guide would be even stronger with either a one or two sentence annotation next to each organization or a link to the organization's about page, the comprehensiveness of the list makes it worth visiting. Check it out. And if you're a librarian with a handout or guide of your own, please post it to the Handout Exchange!