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!

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!.

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?

Last week we introduced the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki, a set of resource guides created by documents librarians for the larger community of government information users. Last week I forgot to mention that the committee that maintains the guides are actively seeking new additions as stated on their website:

The goal of this GODORT Education Committee project is to gather into one place the many tools available to government information librarians to assist in the successful management of electronic government information and in building advocacy skills to promote access to this information.

Please feel free to add your handouts, guides, and tutorials to the Exchange to assist your government information colleagues. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. We can provide templates for one another to save time, share models, and work smarter.

With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, we come to this week's highlight:

Government Documents on Agriculture (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 1999) Last modified 1/29/2008

Bert Chapman has produced a large number of guides to government information. And all of them are quite good. He generally starts his guide as he does here with an introductory paragraph that includes useful catalog subject headings:

The U.S. Government produces voluminous information on agriculture. This information covers material as diverse as gardening advice, crop insurance, rice production, soils of individual U.S. counties, wheat export statistics, and laws. Purdue Libraries have many government publications on agriculture with most of these being in the HSSE, LIFE, and MEL Libraries. Useful subject headings to search the Library Catalog for government information on agriculture include

Agriculture and State--United States
Agricultural Laws and Legislation--United States
Agricultural Price Supports--United States
Crop Insurance
Peanuts
Poultry Industry
Wheat Trade--United States

In addition to listing basic resources such as:

• Agriculture Handbook
• Crop Insurance Handbooks
• Meat & Poultry Inspection Regulations

He also points out agencies likely to have agricultural related publications at various levels of government:

• House Agriculture Committee HSSE DOC Y 4.AG 8/1: (Reps. Mike Pence (R-IN), Joe Donnelly (D-IN) and Brad Ellsworth (R-IN) are members of this committee)
• National Agricultural Safety Database
• Indiana Agricultural Statistics Service
• International Coffee Organization
• South Africa Dept. of Agriculture

This guide highlights an important feature of librarian expertise -- the ability to pull together information sources on a topic from multiple levels of government in a meaningful way. So if you're interested in Agriculture from Indiana to Argentina, check out the rest of this guide. Then see what else is available.

Government Information librarians have acquired a lot of expertise. We've written a lot of guides and pathfinders to government information.

The Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) of ALA has been collecting these handouts for years so we docs librarians wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel every time we needed to create a handout or give someone a starting point for research. Recently, this GODORT "Handout Exchange" has been wikified at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Exchange.

The Handout Exchange is divided into four areas:

• Guides & Handouts for Depository Management
• Subject-oriented Guides and Tutorials
• Source- and Geography-oriented Guides and Tutorials
• Product-oriented Guides and Tutorials

Because the Handout Exchange links to many resources that could help many people outside the depository community, FGI is proud to start a new "Guide of the Week" column to highlight these librarian generated resources.

Our first highlight is from the subject guide page:

Afro-Americans and the Military, 1939-45 (Denise Schoene, Univ. of Michigan, 1997) Last updated 8/6/2004

This guide provides a number of resources to the history of African Americans during this period including:

• Books like The Port Chicago Mutiny. Warner, NY, 1989.
• Journal articles like "Report on the Negro Soldier". Infantry Journal, #59, Dec., 1946 (UD1 .I43)
• Electronic resources like Desegregation of the Armed Services at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/9981.htm.

These resources would be helpful for reports on military history, assignments for Black History Month or creating any number of library displays.

So check out the full guide. Then see what other topics are available.

I was cleaning my condo today and ran across a "government documents jounral" that I turned in as an assignment in grad school back in 1995. Part of what I did for this assignment was to subscribe to Govdoc-l, the documents librarians' electronic mailing list. I had to report my impressions. The three things I cited 13 years ago were:

1. Govdoc-L is practical.
2. Govdoc'rs are helpful
3. Govdoc-l is informative

I expanded on these ideas in my paper and then concluded with:

"In light of the three characteristics outlined above, I feel that it is extremely important for any documents librarian who has access to the internet to subscribe to this list!"

Aside from not being able to conceive a documents librarian without internet access in 2008, I think this advice is just as true today as it was 13 years ago!

These days govdoc-l has an RSS feed, so now there is even less excuse NOT to follow this important government information resource.

Congratulations, Daniel Cornwall!

Stephen Abrams of OPAC vendor SirsiDynix  talks government documents and relates his pet peeves about how governments use PDFs to hide information. As Stephen is Canadian, I'm not sure what government he's talking about, but some of his complaints sound familar to me:

3. Worse, let's create a 10,000 page PDF and try to ask any citizen to download and print that! If your report is too short to make it too big, just append all your data into the appendices and make it HUGE.

5. Place your PDF on your website and don't link it to with an index, table of contents, press release or some other finding tool. Make sure there are no links for the seacrh engine crawlers to crawl! You have plausible deniabliity and can say with a straight face that it's available on the web!

6. And my favourite government opacity strategy? Only place a minimum of metadata on the PDF on the web. Say, just a number like 1237D-f but make sure it's not linked to any real number and just represents a non-sequential accession number for the web file. Then it will be nigh on impossible to find it.

His other tricks make a good read too, but then I'd be reproducing his entire posting. He ends his posting with thanks to librarians and catalogers. Stephen doesn't usually talk about docs, he's more of a Web 2.0/Library 2.0 sort of guy, but his Stephen's Lighthouse blog is always interesting reading.

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.

Stephen C. Weiss, documents librarian at Utah State University Library announced his retirement in a June 13, 2007 govdoc-l posting.

Bernadine Abbott Hoduski, someone I consider to be the institutional memory for the profession of documents librarianship had this praise in a govdoc-l post of her own:

Steve is a truly dedicated, courageous documents librarian. He has taken on many a government agency to persuade them to send their publications to depository libraries. He helped build one of the finest documents collections in the country. Thanks for your lifetime of work Steve.

Indeed, FGI thanks you as well for your life of service. And we're glad to hear that you will keep up with Internet Quick Reference.

Pat Ragains, Business and Government Information Center librarian at the University of Nevada Reno Library, was quoted in a Reno Gazette Journal article about patent resources at UNR.

According to the article, "The University of Nevada, Reno library is one of 80 sites in the nation that is an official Patent & Trademark Depository Library" and has been helping patrons since 1983.

Pat, congratulations on the getting the word out about UNR's valuable holdings!

Do you know of a media story highlighting some sort of government documents depository? Let us know!

Over on our ResourceShelf site, my colleague, Shirl Kennedy, offers a bunch of links to the recently introduced: S. 1121 and H.R. 1877.

News Release:

The legislation co-sponsored by Senators Jack Reed and (D-RI) and Thad Cochran (R-MS), "to address the shortage of librarians in low-income areas across the country."

Track the Legislation as it Moves through Congress with GovTrack
Bill #'s:
S. 1121 ||| RSS Feed

H.R. 1877 ||| RSS Feed