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?