GPO recognizes that with the ever-increasing amount of electronic U.S. Government information, we need your help! Since 1997, depository libraries have worked with GPO to ensure permanent public access to electronic content and to provide services to assist other depositories and the public by becoming a GPO partner.

Our recent partnerships include:

• Government Information Online: Ask A Librarian
• Homeland Security Digital Library
• Historical Publications of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

Does your library have a project, resource, or service that would benefit the depository library community and the public? Consider a partnership with GPO and have a direct impact upon citizens' access and use of government information. Learn more about GPO's partnership program.

The ever-increasing amount of electronic U.S. Government information requires a team effort.

I spend a good deal of time scouring newspapers and Web sites like Docuticker (RSS Feed) and UN Pulse (RSS Feed) in order to add digital government documents to my library's collections. Sometimes I have the url cataloged; or if I think the document is particularly in danger of disappearing, I'll upload them to the Internet Archive's govt documents collection. Below are a few that I've come across in my digitravels recently.

At the upcoming International Documents Taskforce (IDTF) meeting at ALA Annual Conference (GODORT conference schedule here), I'm giving a short presentation about digital collections. I'd really like to hear how/if others are doing digital collection development either randomly or as a matter of course. Please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts, ideas, and hopes. Please include any information you care to share -- what you do, how you do it, if you have favorite haunts/Websites etc.

• Addressing the global food crisis: Key trade, investment and commodity policies in ensuring sustainable food security and alleviating poverty. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
• The Contribution of Early Childhood Education to a Sustainable Society. UNESCO
• Carpet bombing in cyberspace. Armed Forces Journal
• The Employment Situation: May 2008. Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Senate Intelligence Committee Unveils Final Phase II Reports on Prewar Iraq Intelligence. U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence.
  • Phase II Report on Public Statements (PDF; 2.5 MB)
  • Phase II Report on DoD Policy Office (PDF; 819 KB)
• Eighth Annual Trafficking in Persons Report. U.S. Department of State. Download in sections or as full report (PDF).

The Internet Archive has many fans here at FGI. If you're not familiar with this project, go check out the slide show at Wired magazine about the mechanics of the Internet Archive Book-Scanning project.

"While Google has made headlines over the last two years for scanning thousands of copyrighted works for its Book Search project, the Internet Archive is quietly digitizing around 1,000 public domain titles every day...the text collection on archive.org is the world's largest online collection of free books, with nearly 350,000 titles and growing."

I wrote about creating a digital government documents library with Google Books a few weeks ago, but the Internet Archive also has a plethora of digitized government publications, as pointed out to me in the comments. Since then, I've been happily "bookmarking" government documents of interest to my patrons and my depository. These bookmarked documents can be shared via a wiki subject guide or a social bookmarking tool of your choice.

However, unlike Google Books, there is no RSS feed for recently bookmarked documents, and your bookmarks are not arranged via topic or title order, but by the date you bookmarked them. Maybe these features could be suggested to them or brought up in the forum? You can also contribute or donate to the Internet Archive as well. Nevertheless, the satisfaction you get from using and marketing this non-profit, actual library should be rewarding enough!

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced the online availability of over 5.2 million records of passengers who arrived at the ports of Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia in the 19th century. These records were transcribed from original ship manifests into databases by Temple University's Center for Immigration Research and donated to NARA.

Intrigued, I went to NARA's Access to Archival Databases (AAD) and searched "Records for Passengers Who Arrived at the Port of New York During the Irish Famine" between 1846-1851 (over 607,800 records!), and I found several of my Troy clan ancestors that arrived in 1851. I'll have to compare the names with the extensive family tree that my grandfather made. If he was alive today, he'd be searching this database for hours!

Other record sets include: Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Germans to the United States, 1850-1897; Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Italians to the United States, 1855-1900; and Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Russians to the United States, 1834-1897.

Thanks to FGI BOTM alum Carlos Diaz for notifying the govdoc-l list about a new resource from the National Agricultural Library (quote edited for URL formatting):

Looks like the NAL has begun to digitize in .tiff format their historical collection of publications including the Agriculture handbooks and yearbooks, etc.

You can find the Digital Repository at http://naldr.nal.usda.gov/

A very precious resource indeed.

We agree. The digital repository has publications going back many decades for the following series:

Agricultural Economic Report
Agriculture Handbook
Agriculture Information Bulletin
Bean Improvement Cooperative Annual Report
Bean Improvement Cooperative Natl Dry Bean Res Assoc Conference
Division Pomology Bulletin
Economic Research Service Staff Report
Fruit Vegetable Market News Report
Pomological Watercolors
Report Commissioner Agriculture
Report Secretary Agriculture
Rural Development Perspectives
Rural Development Research Report
Technical Bulletin United States Department Agriculture
World Poultry Congress
Yearbook United States Department Agriculture

Some monograph publications and other non-series publications are also available. The documents are a touch awkward to use though. You need to page through them one page at a time. But if you use their "print pdf" button, you can get a PDF file for your use. Another nice feature of this site is an RSS feed and list of recent additions.

Finally the repository can be searched. Results include not only matching publications, but also specific page numbers. Results can be sorted by the column headings, very nice!

Naturally I used "Alaska" for my search. It brought up hundreds of results, including this tidbit from the 1958 Agriculture Yearbook:

Creator        Johnson, Hugh A.    
Title     Seward's folly can be a great land.    
Source     Yearbook United States Department Agriculture    
Year     1958    
Volume_Info     1958    
Pages     p. 424-439.

Go and check out this resource. And then remember that it was a LIBRARIAN who brought it to you! Thanks again, Carlos!

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is calling for the papers of the Founding Fathers Project to be made available to all Americans through the Internet  according to a story in a Vermont newspaper.  The Project has been collecting and annotating the papers for 50 years.  The project has been criticized for moving too slowly and for costing more than an estimated $60 million in federal and private funding.  Leahy's Committee heard testimony from Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough whose access to the papers of John Adams contributed to research for his award-winning biography. 
Leahy is quoted in a press release as saying "I support the prompt digitization of all of the Founding Fathers’ Papers, so that this information can be made available to all Americans via the Internet.  If Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and Franklin could pipe into this discussion today, we all know that they would ask, “What are you waiting for?”  Harnessing the exquisite power of the Internet to preserve and proliferate the Founders’ papers is a marriage made in Heaven. "

The librarians at the University of Michigan/Google book digitization project - called the "MBook Project" - had cause to celebrate on Friday as they digitized the millionth book in their collection, leaving just 6.5 million more to go. Michigan is one of the only institutions partnering with Google to agree to scan every one of its holdings — even those that are still covered by copyright. The MBooks project provides full text of works that are in the public domain, creating new ways for users to search and access U-M Library content (anyone can access this digital content). Materials that are currently in copyright are available for searching on-line, allowing users to assess the contents of a book before deciding whether to purchase it or borrow it from the library. Are there any govdocs in the collection? A quick search in their catalog did turn up some govdocs, beautifully digitized.  I went to the Mirlyn library catalog (very nice OPAC, btw) and did an Advanced Search using keyword Subcommittee AND Titleword =Congress AND titleword= Hearing* and searched just the format= Electronic Resource (according to their FAQ, that's the way to find the MBook content). I got 3064 hits ranging in date from 1896 to 2007 - for example, this 1935 digitized hearing before "a subcommittee of the Committee on military affairs, United States Senate, 74th Congress, on S. 1404, a bill to promote the efficiency of national defense."   We don't even have the microfiche in my law library.

So the good news is that there are digitized Congressional hearings freely available to the public in the MBook project. For some reason, though, I have found that a number of them, like this 1924 hearing, come up as "Search Only:  Page images and full text of this item are not available due to copyright restrictions."  I thought there weren't any copyright restrictions on government documents.

This week the British library released a report of research designed "to identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years' time."

• Pioneering research shows 'Google Generation' is a myth, British Library, Press Release, 16 January 2008.
• Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (PDF format; 1.67MB)

The reseach addresses the "media hype surrounding the 'Google generation' [those born after 1993] phenomenon" with an aim "to help library and information services to anticipate and react to any new or emerging behaviours in the most effective way."

Two things jumped out at me in the report. First, the idea that there is a "google generation" that has different information-seeking behavior from other generations because it has grown up with the Internet, the Web, search engines, and so forth, is largely false.

In many ways the Google generation label is increasingly unhelpful: recent research finds that it is not even accurate within the cohort of young people that it seeks to stereotype.

As Ian Rowlands says, there is a lot of "powerpoint puff" about this idea of a very different "google generation" ("Net Generation", "Digital Natives", "Millennials") and "many people have instant opinions" about it, but, until now, we have had very little evidence to support the assumptions. Now we have some research that says that "Many of the claims made on behalf of the Google Generation in the popular media fail to stack up fully against the evidence."

Second, there are changes in how all people seek information and do research. As the report notes: "much writing on the topic of this report overestimates the impact of ICTs [Information and Communications Technologies] on the young and underestimates its effect on older generations" [emphasis added]. The information seeking behavior of researchers, not just young people, but professors, lecturers and practitioners, has changed significantly.

Everyone exhibits a bouncing / flicking behaviour, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically. Power browsing and viewing is the norm for all. [emphasis added]

There is a lot of interesting information in this study and it deserves to be read by every librarian. In its conclusions, I noticed several themes that we've emphasized about government information here at FGI:

The significance of this for research libraries is threefold:

• they need to make their sites more highly visible in cyberspace by opening them up to search engines [e.g., Is your search engine finding the government information you need?]
• they should abandon any hope of being a one-stop shop. [Having a one-stop, single repository (GPO's "Federal Digital System") as the only digital repository of government information is not as good an idea as supplementing such a monolithic repository with many subject collections that mingle non-government information with government information. See, Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program]
• they should accept that much content will seldom or never be used, other than perhaps a place from which to bounce. [Preservation of the less-used and seldom used materials will continue to be a cost drain on a government that is using cost-savings as a reason to justify its digital decisions. See, e.g., Be aware: semi-annual regulatory agenda is 1,700-pages online, 483 pages in print and GPO's Budget and Priorities.]

Research Buzz notes that "Footnote.com has announced that it has digitized the entire Project Blue Book, which is a collection of official records covering government investigations of UFOs, 1947-1969."

How about meta-data? "Footnote allows people to comment on and annotate interesting documents. So you can not only keyword search and browse the total collection, but also browse highlights. Scanned documents have a place to add comments about documents as well as annotations to the documents themselves."

• Footnote Making Project Blue Book Available, Research Buzz (August 10, 2007)
• Project Blue Book - UFO Investigations 1947-1969 Footnote.com (Source: The National Archives)