Housing has been an issue both this year in general and as an election issue. So this week I'm highlighting another Bert Chapman guide that he allowed the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki to link to:

* Housing (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 2001) Last updated 6/18/2008

In his introduction, Bert notes:

Housing affects our lives in many ways. We buy and sell homes, rent apartments, and invest in residential and commercial properties. Government agencies produce many publications on various aspects of housing. These publications can be found in various Purdue Libraries with the HSSE and MEL libraries having the largest collections. Examples of Library Catalog subject headings you can use to search for government documents on housing include:

• Government Sale of Real Property United States
• Home Ownership United States
• Housing Policy United States
• Housing Surveys United States
• Rental Housing Law and Legislation United States

He then identifies a number of resources including:

• A Chronology of Housing Legislation & Selected Executive Actions 1892-2003 HSSE DOC Y 4.F 49/20:108-D
• American Housing Survey (various cities) HSSE DOC C 3.215:H-170/
• Census of Construction Industries MEL REF, MEL, & STOR C 3.245/
• Mortgage Insurance Companies of America/Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Reports MEL REF FR 1.63/
• Germany Federal Ministry of Transport, Building, & Housing (In German)

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.

Update: September 4, 2008

It breaks my heart and embarrasses me to do this, but I've discovered that the circulation figures I used for the post below were flawed. Specifically, the reports I consulted treated internal processing as a checkout.

Once we recalculated our circ stats to only include transactions involving real patrons and ILL transactions, we found that our document circulation has been relatively low and flat for the last five years. No visible bump from cataloging the collection.

Is this the end of the story? I doubt it. First, we only completed the retro project this year, so a number of documents haven't been available in the catalog for too long. Second, staff are now in a better place to identify and promote federal documents then we were last year. This may make higher circulation possible. But I don't know. I'll get back to you.

- Daniel

======Original Post==========
At the Alaska State Library, we recently completed a barcoding project which finally let us put all of our manual shelflist items into our catalog for our patrons to find. This also meant that our holdings went onto Open WorldCat for others to find.

I'm happy to report that we've had a 7% increase in checkouts of federal documents compared to the previous fiscal year. I'm sure the cataloging project was responsible because the rate of increase for documents checkouts outperformed other parts of the collection.

Since the project was only completed in the fiscal year that ended on June 30th, I expect to see more growth in documents checkouts in the coming year.

There are many ways to make open a tangible collection to the world. Good cataloging is a start!

One of the presentations I was able to attend at ALA was Libraries & Government: Issues, Services and Strategies. Notes and handouts to this session should eventually be available on ALA's 2008 Conference materials site at http://presentations.ala.org/index.php?title=Monday%2C_June_30#Monday_10:30am_Start_Time.

The presenters were John Carlo Bertot, Mary Alice Baish, Suzanne Sears and Pat Ball. The presentation was a good mix of policy level and library level ideas on egovernment as it affects libraries. All libraries, not just Federal Depository Libraries.

John Bertot introduced the session and suggested people look at his college's E-Government for Public Librarians site at http://www.libraryegov.org/.

Suzanne Sears' part included tips on how to assist people looking to use egovernment services while respect most libraries time limits on Internet computers. The tip that most stood out to me was to have worksheets (like the ones for student aid FAFSA forms) available in the library. Encourage patrons to complete the worksheet prior to getting on the computer. This seems like it would decrease frustration for everyone.

Mary Alice Baish provided an overview of the E-Government Services Act of 2002 and of efforts to renew this expiring Act. Among other things, this is the Act that brought us usa.gov. If the Act ultimately expires, a lot of things could go away, including usa.gov. That would be bad.

There is a good chance that the Act will be renewed, since a recent OMB report said that while e-government initiatives cost agencies $121 million/year, the federal government is collecting $340 million in fees from egovernment sites. So it's a great deal for the government, if not for taxpayers. That's why Mary Alice's organization, the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) is working with ALA and other stakeholders for improvements in the legislation. She asked librarians to help in the reauthorization movement and offered several suggestions including:

• Contact your Senator, especially if they serve on the Senate Homeland Security Committee and tell them you support S. 2321
• Assess government web sites and services and publish your findings.

Pat Ball gave an overview of ALA's efforts regarding the egovernment issue. Among other things, an association-wide committee on e-government has been formed. You can learn more about its work at http://www.wo.ala.org/egovservices/index.php?title=Main_Page.

This isn't a complete summary of the session, but hopefully it is interesting enough to inspire. Please keep an eye out for presentation materials at the ALA conference site listed above.

If you were at the e-gov session and would like to add stuff, please leave a comment.

I saw the LITA's President's program at ALA on Sunday, June 29, 2008. The program was called "Isn't it great to be in the library? Wherever that is." The presenters were Joe Janes and the bloggers from OCLC's It's all good blog.

While it was aimed at libraries in general, I think it has special relevance for document depositories of all levels of government.

Joe Janes answered the question, "What does it mean to be in a library?" as follows, "Anywhere, anytime, any way, which people interact with information organized and/or provided that is supported by their own community via their library staff." Notice that this is a definition that takes in physical as well as virtual transactions. Janes suggested that a library in the 21st Century is both somewhere and everywhere. In terms of how to serve our patrons, Janes asserted, "We must be available, positioned, and ready to support our patrons, to assist and participate with them -- on their terms."

This seems like good advice for depositories, whether federal, state, or international. We need to remain physical places to accommodate the 80 million plus Americans who are not online and may not be joining the net anytime soon. But we also need to be available for the hundreds of millions of Americans who ARE online. Our libraries, our resources and our expertise must be easily discoverable on the web for our local and remote users. How can we do this?

• Like James Jacobs has suggested, we can blog our answers to interesting reference questions. Especially if the answers are not findable on the public internet.
• If you are a Federal Depository Library coordinator, stop reading this post right now and e-mail John Shuler about how your library can participate in Government Information Online, the nationwide govdoc chat reference service that now has about two dozen partners, including my library. It's easy to participate and will only get easier as more libraries join. The service is already been used. I've personally helped people locate documents on the 1960s New Left, found HUD info specific to Native Americans and point veterans towards educational benefits.
• Join Rebecca Blakeley and the Washington State Library in establishing LibraryThing accounts.
• Join the Alaska State Library in establishing Open WorldCat lists that come with RSS feeds.
• Join the growing number of libraries offering RSS feeds for new fed docs.
• Survey your users and see where they like to find information online. Then try to be in at least one of those places.

You don't have to do everything. No one can do everything, but please try to do just one thing this coming month to expand your online visibility. If you live in a community where most people aren't online, you're excused.

Have other ideas? Did something work especially well for you? Let us know in a comment.

For all you Doctor Who fans out there, I just got word that in this week's episode, "Silence in the Library", the good Doctor and Donna visit an abandoned outer space library complete with data ghosts!

[thanks to the shifted librarian!]

Thanks to my fellow blogger for the link to Fister's article.  I recently came across an article (linked through that splendid online publication brought to us by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Arts and Letters Daily) that offers more food for thought.  Titled Better than Free,this thoughtful piece by Kevin Kelly of Wired discusses how we might be able to add value to the vast amount of free information now available - value that people will be willing to pay for. He says that "The internet is a copy machine....When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can't be copied?" He discusses eight "generative values" that are better than free: 
immediacy,  personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability.  All of these are relevant to librarians as we adjust our skill sets to provide information available on the internet. 

Michael Sauers, who has the wonderful title of "Technology Innovation Librarian" and blogs for the Nebraska Library Commission, has started cataloging and offering Creative Commons-licensed works at his library.  What he did was to take electronic versions of CC titles, post them on his library's Web server, catalog them in the OPAC, and make them available to the public. Additionally, for titles whose license allows for physical printing of the works, they turned the electronic books into spiral-bound books to be added to the physical collection.  The result, so far, is that his library now has a collection of 9 CC-licensed electronic titles available through the OPAC along with 7 print versions available to circulate.   Also, seven of the nine titles resulted in brand new records in OCLC.  Corey Doctorow, one of the authors, has blogged about the project over at BoingBoing.

This is my final post as guest blogger on FGI.  I've really enjoyed this gig and I want to thank FGI for invting me.  This is also probably the last time I'll be contributing to public discussions as a librarian.  Last week I learned that my position is being abolished.  The budget was tight, they needed to cut, and my position was selected.   

So indulge me a moment as I stroll down memory lane.

My first library job was at the Steenbock Agricultural Library at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. This is where I first mastered the intricacies of gov docs.

After college I moved to Chicago, where I got a job at the John Marshall Law School library, still filing government documents but now expanding my repertoire to include serials checkin (on a kardex, remember those?) and looseleaf updates.  

After Chicago I moved to Los Angeles where I got a job at the RAND Corporation library in Santa Monica, doing serials checkin again, as well as acquisitions and copy cataloging.  One year they gave us all PCs and a few months later Migell Acosta loaded a Mosaic browser on my machine.  Things have never been the same since.

A few years later I  got my MLIS from UCLA.  I was no longer a "paraprofessional"... 

I moved to D.C. and hopped around a bunch of library jobs (including one that took me to all the Marine Corps base libraries on the East Coast- Semper Fi!) until I arrived at the IMF where I took a job as librarian in 2000.   I did systems librarian work mostly, then got into training and that pretty much brings me to today.

So that's it.  While I never say never, it's most likely that my career as a librarian is over. 

See you on the dark side of the moon. 

One of things that libraries bring to the world of government information is the ability to take preexisting materials, make them user-friendly and offer them to the world at large for no charge. This is particularly true in the world of public domain federal government information, at least when it comes to digitizing.

A project I'd like to highlight today is a searchable version of the Foreign Relations of the United States done by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago Libraries.

For those not familar, here is a description of Foreign Relations of the United States from the State Department:

The Foreign Relations of the United States series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. The series, which is produced by the State Department's Office of the Historian, began in 1861 and now comprises more than 350 individual volumes. The volumes published over the last two decades increasingly contain declassified records from all the foreign affairs agencies.

Foreign Relations volumes contain documents from Presidential libraries, Departments of State and Defense, National Security Council, Central Intelligence Agency, Agency for International Development, and other foreign affairs agencies as well as the private papers of individuals involved in formulating U.S. foreign policy.  In general, the editors choose documentation that illuminates policy formulation and major aspects and repercussions of its execution.  Volumes published over the past few years have expanded the scope of the series in two important ways:  first by including documents from a wider range of government agencies, particularly those involved with intelligence activity and covert actions, and second by including transcripts prepared from Presidential tape recordings.

In short, it's a good place to get declassifed materials and context for most US foreign policy decisions. The two University libraries and Federal Depository Library Program members digitized the paper volumes so that the text would be searchable, but researchers can see the actual pages of reproduced telegrams and the like.

I think this resource will be of great value to researchers. When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a senior paper on Turkey's accession to NATO. I wound up having to use FRUS a lot because that's where NATO meetings got recorded in the 1940s and 1950s, not as you'd expect in NATO publications. I remember checking out a dozen volumes at a time, stacking them on my apartment floor and carefully going through the index for "Turkey" and looking up pages and bookmarking them for later xeroxing. How I wished I had this product then. If made widely known, it could help people better understand historical foreign policy and contribute to today's policy debates.

A private company could have done this. But then it would be a subscription product and the average citizen or undergrad student couldn't be bothered with it. Now our declassified foreign policy heritage, both good and bad is out there for the whole world to see. And that's a good thing. Now if the CIA would stop trying to block new releases.

Is there some product at your library that you can add value to and show the world? Tell us!

A coworker tipped me off to a law-lib posting by Brent Johnson about a panel at the American Association of Law Librarians annual meeting that sounds like it was a riot:

GD-SIS Program: Tough Librarians Rise to the Challenge with Tough Government Documents

Andrew P. Evans gave a talk on Combative and Military Government Documents that offered these citizen benefits to reading military docs:

• The military’s ability to evolve combat techniques.
• Real world application
• Gun and knife safety.
• Question the techniques- it’s your civic duty

He illustrates the last point with a number of critiques on a hand-to-hand combat manual from civilian martial arts experts. Their advice - some things shouldn't be tried on the battlefield, much less at home!

SaraJean Petite shared on Dangers of Open Water Swimming that One Can Avoid, which among other things offered advice to people who row themselves to work as a friend of mine does.

Brent Johnson himself presented on National and State Park Government Documents, which he suggested could be of interest to the "Sierra Club, hiking clubs, mountain bikers, rafting groups, and anyone looking for “active rest.”"

His presentation started off with finding a park, mapping it, and then showing the different things you can do at a park with each use illustrated with a presumably public domain park photo.

What all three presentations had in common is that they brought government documents within the sphere of everyday interest. People these days want to defend themselves, often swim, and usually need somewhere to get away from it all. All three of the librarians figured out to take the eye-glazing subject of govdocs and make it relevant to an audience. Let's give them a hand and think about how we can do the same. Because if we can't make documents relevant, no one will care.

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Here is my long-delayed field report on the Second Life Branch of the Nebraska Library Commission.

In short, I'm impressed. The thing I'm most impressed by is that the Nebraska Library Commission offers clear reasons about why they are in Second Life and what they hope to accomplish. They state this on a notecard available in the lobby:

Why we are in Second Life:

1. To network and develop professional relationships with other librarians from around the country and around the world.

2. To explore whether and how libraries might use 3-D virtual worlds to reach out to new users.

3. To gain first-hand knowledge of library activities in Second Life that we can bring back and share with interested Nebraska librarians.

Might not be compelling reasons to all, but I'm glad to see that they can explain why they're devoting resources to this in a nice soundbite.

All areas of the library appear to be represented, including Government Documents. While there is no formal display of documents that I could find, there was a notecard about Nebraska related questions that included a link to the Nebraska Documents Depository program. In addition there there several Nebraska related maps around the first floor.

The second floor is devoted to a display of photos from the Nebraska Memories database developed by multiple institutions in Nebraska. Here is a picture I took of part of the display:

Notecards describing the photos are available, as is a link directly to the photo's Nebraska Memories page where people can see more details and search for related items. It has a nice museum feel to it and as I've mentioned in previous posting on Second Life, I think musueum type displays are going to be natural for virtual worlds like Second Life.

One last nice touch by the NLC staff is a card in the lobby titled "What to do in Second Life" which features staff picks about places to go and things to do in the virtual environment. It has a mix of education and entertainment. I plan to visit several of the places listed on the card, including returning to Washtown, a Firefly inspired enviornment complete with a replica of Serenity. I went there today, but Second Life crashed on me before I could look around much. More proof that the 3D world is coming, but isn't quite here yet in the sense that the web is.

Ever notice how bad news and ideas tend to get released on Fridays? Such is the case with GPO's Creation of Brief Bibliographic Records Overview, released in a Friday morning FDLP-L listserv announcement.

I've read through the five page briefing document twice and looked at the 12 bib records that GPO stated were typical of the 50 chosen for the pilot project. I believe that it is a flawed proposal that ignores the actual and potential contributions of the 1200+ depository library network. Despite its obvious good intentions of getting more information out the community, I don't think the current proposal would do this.

Here are some first thoughts on the paper and I hope that you will share others:

1) GPO seems to be ignoring existing cataloging to create their brief records. They took a sample of 50 records and cataloged them without looking outside GPO or possible copy cataloging in OCLC.

Of the 12 records the e-mail asks us to look at, I judge nine, or 75% of the records to already have adequate cataloging in WorldCat. Please see my Open WorldCat list at http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/dcornwall/lists/5666 for a demonstration of this fact. In a number of cases, GPO seems to have created separate records for paper and online formats. If they want to streamline their cataloging process, it seems to me that one record with a note of tangible and online availability would be a better start.

2) GPO must change its mind about not OCLC batch-loading materials not being distributed to depositories. There are many items which while not deposited to libraries are still of interest. Loading them into WorldCat will expose them to the open Web and allow for better visibility for government information.

3) Brief records without some kind of subject descriptors will be almost unfindable in the future unless one is lucky enough to remember the agency name or if the title accurately reflects the
subject one is interested in. Also, it makes it next to impossible to build good literature reviews of government research and/or activities. Full text searching has been shown to be inadequate in a number of ways. We need subject descriptors.

4) While GPO is stating that records for materials destined for deposit into the FDLP will be upgraded "later", there is nothing in the GPO's funding history to indicate that money for better cataloging will be available in the future. Or in the history of many libraries that created "temp bib records" to "find things now."

5) Related to ignoring copy cataloging is a missed opportunity by GPO - share the cataloging load with the depository community, at least in part. Not all depositories have a cataloger, but many
do. Many institutions, like universities and State Libraries, have an intense hunger for docs in their subject specialties or geographic areas. Let libraries sign up for an agency or State and start feeding them title pages or electronic versions if they're available. Or just tag gov web docs on del.icio.us or other social tagging services and let whatever libraries or people assign subject descriptors to them who feel led to. Together we could rid GPO of its backlog while providing enough metadata to ensure future findability.

Read the proposal. Look at the sample records, decide whether I'm overreacting. Or help construct a response to what seems like a bad idea that once again passes up an opportunity for real partnership in favor of a flawed go-it-alone "solution."

And if GPO staff think that I've mischaracterized the project, I'd encourage them to post an official response here where people can see what we both say side by side and make up their own minds. And in the likely event I haven't mischaracterized the project, I hope that GPO will come to the community and embrace the wealth of cataloging/metadata that already exists and plan with us how to take care of the materials not already found in WorldCat.

Thanks to Michael Sauers at the Nebraska Library Commission Blog for pointing out this YouTube Video on what librarians and other educator groups are doing with Second Life:

I recommend this video if you haven't tried Second Life yet. This video downloads a lot faster than SL's 30MB client software. If you're intrigued to investigate on your own, go to Second Life and get your free avatar. You're only cost will be time and a twice monthly railing at required updates.

One of the ways we FGI volunteers try to keep up with the government information news is through the use of Google Alerts.

Sometimes these "new alerts" dredge up old information that is still of interest.

For example, today's alert looking for instances of "Free Government Information", brought out this interesting item from the new ERIC database:

ERIC #: EJ491407
Title: Costing Out a Depository Library: What Free Government Information?
Authors: Dugan, Robert E.; Dodsworth, Ellen M.
Source: Government Information Quarterly, v11 n3 p261-84 1994

Back in 1994, the authors came to this somewhat startling conclusion in their abstract:

In 1993, the Georgetown University library spent over four dollars to support its depository program for every dollar the Government Printing Office spent to distribute the information. Methods used to calculate costs, cost-sharing issues, and suggested action are discussed. Appendixes include a summary of the cost-compilation model and a selective bibliography. (Contains 30 references.) (KRN)

Anyone out know if this is still true? Although printed output of government is down drastically, people still need to discover, describe and provide access to government information resources.

A quick browse of the first two screens of ERIC documents related to Depository Libraries took me back to 2001 without a similar study.

Please let us know about more recent studies in the comments section.