Because they've been in the news, I'm highlighting the Georgia and Russia country guides produced by the Government Publications Library at the University of Colorado at Boulder, that have just been posted to the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange.

Both guides are broken down into the following sections:

• Government (direct from country) Information
• Country Profiles
• Articles & Databases
• Diplomatic Relations
• Health
• Peacekeeping & Military Information
• Resources in the Catalog
• Related Topics

I believe these guides will be of use to anyone interested in background to the current conflict. I suspect it could be a boon to any middle-school and higher grade history class.

So check out the guides above. Then see what else the Handout Exchange has to offer. If you're a docs librarian with a resource guide, share it by linking it to the Exchange.

While searching at the USGS Publications Warehouse, I noticed one of the available tabs was MIA.

Clicking on this tab brought me to the MIA Publication page, where USGS asked the public's help in tracking down missing publications. Here's their explanation:

Listed below are all the USGS series that are currently or will soon be loaded into the Publication Warehouse. Each series may have missing report numbers or unverifiable citations.

Missing report numbers are gaps in the numbering sequence of a series. We do not know if the report was ever released or if there is a reason why the report number was skipped. These reports may have been cancelled, recalled, or destroyed. Report numbers may have been issued in blocks and some may never have been used.

Unverified citations Unverified citations are citations for any publication where there was some information about the publication available but that information could not be confirmed, the publication itself has not been found, and we are not sure if the publication was actually released. Many of the unverified reports were found referenced by other publications as "in press".

Please visit the site for a list of the missing and help out if you can. You'll be responsible for putting more government information on the web.

This week's "Guide of the Week" from the GODORT Handout Exchange is:

Government Documents for Anthropologists (Word file) (Jennie Burroughs, University of Montana, 2008) CC

Like a number of guides in the Handout Exchange, this guide was created for a college course. Because people, including government scholars, have been writing about anthropology for a long time, it has a mix of print and electronic sources including:

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Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology
Call number: SI 1.33:

A monographic series published irregularly.

American Memory Collection
URL: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/

The Library of Congress is building an extensive digital library collection. The American Memory collection includes a wide variety of materials: photographs, correspondence, manuscripts, sound recordings, motion pictures, etc. Folklife materials are included in this digital collection.

NARA 1930 Census
http://1930census.archives.gov/
The 1930 Census is the most recent Census to become available to the public. NARA has an online database that can help you to identify the microfilm roll you need. Then, take that roll number to the microfilm drawers (call number: 312.0973 U58p 1930) to find the relevant reel.

General Land Office Records & Maps - The Bureau of Land Management has created a Federal Land Patents Database that allows you to search for General Land Office grants issued between 1820 and 1908. You can perform a basic search, where you can search by state and patentee name, or a standard search, where you can search by patentee name, by a particular location (described by county, section, township, range, etc.), or by date and land office. http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/

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The CC next to the guide name above means that this particular guide is available for noncommercial copying and adaptation if the original author is cited as stipulated under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. So as long as you provide credit to Jennie Burroughs, you could change her library's call numbers to your own, and print out as many handouts for your students as you like.

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!

For those who are interested in what I learned at Reference Renaissance, please visit http://alaskanlibrarian.wordpress.com/category/rr2008/, where you can find all of my session writeups.

I didn't cross post here because I think most of what I picked up was out of scope for FGI. But a few themes from the conference that I think worth mentioning here are:

• Librarians must support patrons as content creators in addition to supporting them as content users.
• Reference (including document reference) needs to move from supplying stacks of documents to providing more targeted information, along with providing context.
• Librarians must continue to find non-traditional venues to be where information users are.

I was fortunate to meet several current and past documents librarians while in Denver. If any of them are reading this entry, please chime in with your own impressions of the relevance to Reference Renaissance to government information specialists.

While we are a nation of citizens, we are also a nation of consumers. Every patron we have is a consumer and so all of them may have need for our current "Guide of the Week" from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange:

Consumer Issues and Advocacy (Mary Finley, California State University-Northridge (CSUN), 2004) Last updated 1/10/2008

Mary Finley has put together an information guide broken down into sections on Books / Complaint Guides & Consumer Agencies / Business Addresses / Brandnames / Journal Articles / Newspapers / Government Agencies & Activities / Laws and Regulations / Internet.

Many of the print resources listed in this guide can be found close to you either by searching the catalog of your local library or by searching on WorldCat.org. Ms. Finley's guide references online databases that CSUN has paid for the use of their students and faculty. Some of the same databases might be available to you. Check out the Indiana State Library's listing of statewide virtual libraries at http://www.in.gov/library/inspire/other_states.html to see what desktop database access you might have.

Check out the guide. Then see what else is available. And if you're a docs librarian with a handout, please share it!

In the Summer 2008 issue of Dttp: Documents to the People, Kris Kasianovitz has a thoughtful overview of copyright of state and local documents and how that interacts with efforts to digitize such documents.

The article:

Why Care About Copyright? by Chris Kasianovitz. Dttp, v.36, no. 2, Summer 2008, p. 12

Gives a history of state/local copyright and argues that for history's sake and on the principle of free access to government information, copyright law ought to be amended to give state and local gov't documents the same public domain status as federal documents. We at FGI are in hearty agreement with that!

As far as I can tell, Kris' article is not freely available on line, but some of the history she covers is also available on our government copyright page at http://freegovinfo.info/copyright.

The whole Summer 2008 Dttp is well worth the read. There is also a freely available web supplement that you should check out at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/DttP_Supplements_v36_n2 if for no other reason than that FGI's own James Jacobs has an article on using del.icio.us for government documents.

A week from today, I (Daniel) will be attending the Reference Renaissance conference in Denver. If you're attending, let's talk. If there's enough of us, maybe we can do a meal or something.

I'm attending for my library and I'm mostly looking for ways to better serve our large number of remote users. But I'm sure there'll be something that can be put to documents use. Assuming there is, I'll do my best to blog about it here.

Do you know your SIC from your SITC? Do you know where to find foreign trade statistics? How about where to look up an unfamiliar term from international trade? Let this week's ALA GODORT Handout Exchange guide help you:

International Trade (Ed Herman, University of Buffalo, 2007) CC

This guide is part annotated bibliography and part explanation of different trade classification schemes. It is broken down into the following areas:

Background Information for Foreign Trade
Trade Classifications
Trade Statistics-United States
Trade Statistics-States
Trade Statistics-Other Countries
Background Data About Foreign Countries
Trade Barriers
Trade Treaties, Laws, and Regulations
Key Government Agencies Supporting Foreign Trade

The CC next to the guide name above means that this particular guide is available for noncommercial copying and adaptation if the original author is cited as stipulated under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. So as long as you provide credit to Ed Herman, you could change his library's call numbers to your own, and print out as many handouts for your students as you like.

Check out the rest of this guide. Then see what else is available. Are you a librarian with a govdocs handout to share? Add your handout to the Exchange Wiki by either linking your handout to the wiki or typing the handout into the wiki. Need help? Ask Daniel at dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net.

As part of the fruit of the ALA GODORT State and Local Documents Task Force's State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project, I used the project blog to create a listing of state-level campaign finance databases.

So far I've got nine states: Alaska, Alabama, Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada and Ohio. Do you know of other state campaign finance databases? Either leave a comment below of drop me a line at dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net.

And if you use any of the databases listed above, I'd really love to see your comments on the project blog entry for that database.

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?

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!

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.

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.