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.

This will be my last entry as your Blogger of the Month for March. I have learned so much about government information and I have enjoyed learning from all of you as well. Thank you for letting me, a newbie in Government Documents, be a part of all this! But this isn't a goodbye, as I'll post my musings every now and again here at FGI. I'm addicted now, so you are not going to get rid of me so easily. *wink*

Before I sign off, I want to let you know about my department's wiki page that I am working on (more will be added as the years go by, I'm sure) on "Gov Docs 2.0" Resources as well as a link to my presentation that I gave at the Louisiana Library Association. If you would like to contribute information to the Gov Docs 2.0 Resources page, let me know. I can give you a password to access just that part of the wiki. So far, the page contains mostly Web 2.0 resources but I would like to include examples of other Government Depositories using Web 2.0 technologies too. I know the GODORT wiki , the Ning Library 2.0 and Government Library 2.0 group, and here at FGI there are some pages and directories about this topic too (I'll link to them from my wiki).

If Gov Docs 2.0 interests you, be sure to attend the Docs 2.0 pre-conference at ALA Anaheim! I wish I could be there, but I'll be busy being an "Emerging Leader" that day at the EL 2008 Workshop. If I could split myself in half in order to attend both, I would!

Ok, one more shameless self promotion before I go...feel free to stop by and read my depository's blog, Gov Docs on the Bayou. I welcome all comments and discussion!

Until next time,
Rebecca Blakeley

I finally found some good news to cheer me up after writing the last two posts. ;-)

UC Berkeley Library used wiki software to create a congressional research tutorial called Congresearch. It includes Flash tutorial videos on finding a bill, a hearing, a congressional debate, etc. This one is my favorite. Over time, more tutorials will be added. You can offer them feedback too.

The tutorial homepage also contains links to current congressional news, recent votes and a link to their customized Congressional Search Engine created with Google CSE to create a focused Google search on current official U.S. Congressional websites and news organizations focusing on Congress.

I am in Gov Doc 2.0 Nerd Utopia.

Here is a great example of "Government Documents 2.0" in action: OpenCongress.org offers several Web 2.0 tools such as the OpenCongress Facebook application, where you can put bills that interest you on your Facebook profile. You can show your support or opposition to each bill, or simply remain neutral by selecting the "just following" option. Each bill links back to OpenCongress, so your patrons or friends can get all the information they need in order to understand and become involved with the issues themselves.

One of their Web 2.0 tools that I use for my GovGuides Wiki (a work in progress, mind you!), is the "Bill by Issue Widget". I created one for the Environmental Law GovGuides Wiki page I'm working on. It displays the latest bills introduced in Congress on anything to do with environmental law enforcement.

If you are not familiar with OpenCongress, it's a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource "with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement". OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. It uses data provided by GovTrack.us, which collects data from official government websites, such as Thomas. For more info, see previous FGI posts about OpenCongress: My OpenCongress, Congress Remix, and FGI's "Remixes page".

OpenCongress makes it easy to understand each bill by giving a brief summary, who sponsored it, its status, and related bills. And yes, there are links to the full text of the bill and its voting history from Thomas. However, I do encourage students in my instruction classes to cite the original sources that OpenCongress leads them to, such as the full text of the bill from Thomas, congressional record references, or the homepages that OpenCongress links to for various committees and congressmen, etc. And of course I remind them that not everything is online, especially older government information, so they must turn to the print sources that I show them how to locate and use. By that time, the students are much more apt to pay attention and understand the importance of the exotic experience of handling/using the 1945 volume of the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications or a Congressional Record volume from 1918. ;-)

I find OpenCongress to be a very user friendly and a convenient "one stop shop" for learning about legislation. Students in my library instruction classes seem to love using it, so if it gets them excited about government information, then I love it too!

Digitized Government Documents in Google Books has been written about quite a lot over here at the FGI and I'd like to revisit this topic again but with a different focus.

Trial of the Conspirators, for the Assassination of President Lincoln

Illustrations of the Gross Morbid Anatomy of theBrain in the Insane (isn't that a Cypress Hill song? Nevermind...) by the Government Hospital for the Insane.

How it Feels to be the Husband of a Suffragette (not published by the Government Printing Office, but it is a book housed in the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection in the Library of Congress).

Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion

Most of these documents were scanned at large research universities or depositories, but the quality is not always decent andcan sometimes border on the illegible. I was quite amused when I discovered a staff person's hand digitized on this document's cover:

However, there are bigger snafus than a digitized librarian's hand. For example, despite government documents being in the public domain, Google Books treats most post-1922 (i.e. post-copyright law) government documents as copyrighted material by only allowing a limited view! For more details, please read James Jacobs' post on this issue.

Despite all these issues (which have yet to be resolved), I decided to take advantage of the access to full-text, pre-1922 government documents and create a McNeese Gov Docs "Library"account in Google Books for my depository. The account also allows you to subscribe to updates of its holdings via an RSS feed. I put a link to the library account and the RSS feed on my depository's homepage and our "Gov Guides" wiki. I'll add more of these interesting and old documents as I come across them, especially those pertaining to Louisiana or documents that were lost to Hurricane Rita.

Here are some tips for finding gov docs in Google Books: Use Advanced Search, and in the Publisher field, type in Govt OR GPO OR "Government Printing Office". You can also search by agency, (i.e. "Department of the Interior") by typing the name of the agency in the Author field.

Have fun exploring and building your own digital collections, but please let me know if you find some really cool gov docs, ok?

Now that the 50-State agency database registry has annotated content from most of the fifty states, it is becoming possible to put it to some interesting uses.

For example, one can start to explore common state interests by using the search feature of the ALA GODORT wiki. If you do a search for "film" in the wiki, you'll find that New Mexico and Tennessee have film promotion offices that produce databases. Tennessee will help you find locals in almost any category you can think of for your film production. New Mexico has a similar resource, plus they have a location finder database as well.

In a similar way, a search using the word "buildings" shows you that Ohio, South Dakota and Washington all have resources to help business choose commercial or industrial real estate properties.

What can you discover through browsing or searching the database registry? Let us know in comments.

I'm pleased to report to you that the ALA GODORT State and Local Documents Task Force efforts to create a 50-State Registry of state agency produced databases is nearing the end of its initial setup phase.

With the help of 30 named volunteers, we have created content for 46 states and the District of Columbia. The remaining four states have prospective volunteers who should be filling in content soon or letting me know they cannot take on page volunteer duty at this time.

Please see our nearly completed product at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases.

In these pages you will find databases on finding doctors, shipwrecks, commercial properties, Confederate Veterans pensions, dangerous dogs and much more.

To get a small taste of what is becoming available through the Registry, check out the unofficial project blog "State Databases of the Day" at http://statedatabase.blogspot.com/.

You don't have to be a named volunteer to help with the project. If you go to a state's page and don't see your favorite state agency produced database, go ahead and add it if you are comfortable with editing wikis. If not send your link to the page volunteer, if available, or to me at dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net as project coordinator.

Please try to have a look at the Registry this week. Check out and improve your own state's page. Or check out what's available. A lot of stuff from the California page just amazed me. Think about how you might build subject listings (Wildlife, business, etc) using the Creative Commons' licensed material from this project. Together we're building a good resource. Let's keep at it.

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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.

UNT Government Documents Librarian Starr Hoffman is at ALA and posting selected session notes on her wiki. She posted notes on a digital natives session that also explored how college students and other students are reacting to libraries in social media spaces such as MySpace and Facebook.

The answer? It depends. Some like, some don't. But check out the notes and see what people are doing. Then think about where you could be shining the light of full public access to government information.

Starr's notes on the GODORT Update has some interesting examples showing how government information access is mostly a political issue rather a technological one. Read her notes and then decide whether we are better served by a single Future Digital System housed in an agency susceptible to political/fiscal pressure or by having FDSys be one piece of a geographically distributed, locally built, globally accessed depository library system of the future.

I'm likely the last to know, but in case I'm not:

Open WorldCat lets registered users build lists that can be shared with anyone on the Internet. The lists can have notes. See an example I created at http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/dcornwall/lists/204 on tidal power in Alaska.

This looks like a great way to build bibliographies intended to be shared with wide audiences from many institutions. I could see it being helpful in government documents or state depository programs.

Do you see any use for it? If so, what?

Because we've become aware of state and federal depository libraries tagging government information resources, we've started a new library page to show the latest three items some institutions are tagging. You can find the page through our library or by going to http://freegovinfo.info/node/1255.

If you know of government documents libraries or individual librarians tagging government resources on del.icio.us or somewhere else, please let us know and we'll add them to our list.

Government Documents Librarians and some depositories are starting to use the del.icio.us tagging service to highlight resources and quickly build lists of annotated resources.

Below are some highlights from librarians and libraries we know are tagging federal and state resources on delicious or other social tagging services. If you know of others, please send them our way!

What are Documents Librarians Tagging?

• Alaska Agency Databases
  

• Government Publications Library University of Colorado at Boulder
  

• McNeese Library Government Documents Department
  

As I mentioned in my posting on social psychology for librarians, people tend to follow the "central" route of attitude change only if these three conditions are present:

1. Relevance to audience;
2. Audience has knowledge in the domain;
3. Audience has sense of personal responsibility.

I suggested that items 2 and 3 are weak among documents librarians who hear messages about the importance of building local, but Internet accessible digital collections of government documents like UNT CRS Reports Collection.

A new article:

Hendrix, Dean.
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Knowledge, Use, and Attitudes of Academic Librarians
portal: Libraries and the Academy - Volume 7, Number 2, April 2007, pp. 191-212
Link to Abstract

seems to show that lack of knowledge is part of the problem. This article documents a survey of 162 academic librarians and finds in part:

Overall, academic librarians demonstrated low knowledge levels (mean quiz score = 49 percent), rarely used P2P applications, and exhibited indifferent attitudes (total neutral responses = 42 percent) toward these burgeoning information technologies.

Considering that LOCKSS is a P2P technology, maybe it shouldn't be surprising that the mostly academic documents depository community doesn't quite grasp the power of the P2P approach.

But we don't have to stay unaware of such technologies. Here are a few things you can do to become aware of what's available and what it can do:

1. Read James R's P2P Backgrounder
2. Check out our Digital Libraries Technologies Page
3. Read LOCKSS for Librarians

Not strictly documents related, but the latest issue of D-Lib features a library using Wikipedia in a ethical way to raise awareness and usage of their digital materials:

Lally, Ann M., and Carolyn E. Dunford. "Using Wikipedia to Extend Digital Collections" D-Lib Magazine 13(5/6)(May/June 2007)(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may07/lally/05lally.html)

The UW folks seems to have good before and after tables and graphs to demonstrate that it has been well worth for librarians to add quality library-based content to Wikipedia.

Anyone else in the documents world doing this besides UNT?

Over at the new Library 2.0 Government Documents Group, Rebecca Troy-Horton reports that her library's documents department has opened up a del.icio.us account at http://del.icio.us/MSUGovDoc.

Her links are annotated and look like a good way to provide context to documents link. We at FGI look forward to seeing her growing list and seeing how Rebecca's tag cloud works out.

If your local depository library has a del.icio.us account, would you let us know in comments below? Perhaps docs del.icio.us users could build a network like James R. has suggested from time to time. Knowing who we are is an important first step.