Hi John,

I appreciate you opening up this topic and for helping to educate the next generation of documents librarians. I hope that many people join this thread because you raise a number of important issues that our community should be addressing.

I personally feel that one of the biggest takeaways your students should have is memorize the phrase "Not everything and not everyone is on the 'net." The internet is a wonderful tool and more people have access to more information than ever before. I'm not suggesting we go back to waiting for the Federal Register to arrive in the mail. I live in Alaska and would never go for that!

But, students, end users and many documents librarians still need to keep in mind that not everything is on the Internet. To cite just  example, there is a century plus gap in Congressional materials between the Library of Congress' Century of Lawmaking materials (1774-1875) and what is available through GPO Access (1994 to present). Federal primary materials on the Spanish War, World War I, World War II, the Civil rights Movement and more are incomplete at best on the Internet.

Even today, much material that is posted to the web remains unfindable through search engines and casual browsing by end users. This was most recently demonstrated by the Center for Democracy and Technology. Your students will still need a deep knowledge of governmental organizations if they are to pluck out materials either un or inadequately indexed by the major search engines.

By "not everyone", I refer to the third of Americans who do use the Internet and the millions more who do not have highspeed internet access. To this group of 70,000,000 plus, a large PDF file posted to the web is no answer. Neither is offering to e-mail them, in many cases. Between the not everything and not everyone concepts, I think we will have a mixed media future for years to come. Students should NOT be coming out of library school convinced that the internet has every answer they need NOR that people's information needs should always be fulfilled in print. Seeing younger librarians today, I don't see the second instance a problem for students.

That's what I'd first drill into people if I were teaching a govdocs class today. Turning to your suggested areas, I think you are spot on with the idea:

Is it the changing nature of our library institutions, and by the same token, their shifting responsibility of libraries to keep and preserve government information?

Based on both of our past writings, I'd suspect that we have different ideas of the shifting responsibilities of libraries. I see that as changing formats rather than moving from custodian/preserver to servicer. If I've mischaracterized your position, let me know.

Regardless of whether the future of document storage is centralized or not, the roles of documents librarians are changing/have changed. We have to be much more web aware. We need to know stuff like gov info is unevenly indexed. We need to be aware of file formats and we need some basic knowledge of mashups and other ways to put together data for users. The changing nature of libraries also demands spending more time seeking out where people go for gov-related information and spend time in those places. It also wouldn't hurt to blog about our information finds and searching methods, as long as we don't betray patron information.

I'd alter your point about:

"Is it the technologies of egovernment and how they shape the paths of public information distribution?"

It's not just the technologies of egovernment. It's technology in general. How are people seeking information? What devices are they using? Are they using an Internet Service Provider that has abandoned net neutrality? Are digital rights management technologies (DRM) going to impact government information? Will federal and state agencies start putting information in virtual worlds and social networks that aren't available on the open web? And so on.

I see civil liberties and government transparency as mostly separate issues that mostly intersect in the areas of privacy and mass surveillance. While I don't think a repressive gov't is likely to be free with information, it could happen. The Chinese seem to be making movements towards transparency in government without offering additional political freedoms. So I'm not sure if teaching about civil liberties should be a top three topic in government documents. But it should be on the curriculum in any library/information school.

Thanks again for starting this conversation. I look forward to your reply and especially from hearing from others!

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"And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them." -- Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.

Hi, John, and thanks for this!

I'll start by seconding what Daniel said in his comment. 

I'll add a short idea for exploration: What is the impact of "egovernment" on information preservation? 

I would suggest that "egovernment" is more about information transactions  than information instatiation and that in order to preserve information for the long-term we need to insist on the instantiation of government information in preservable form.  As governments at all levels seek to provide enhanced services, I believe we'll see more services and fewer "documents", more transactions in which each user has a personalized experience but which provide no underlying document to preserve.

As government services scurry to use inadequate budgets to meet current needs for current information who will provide access to older information?

I think new govdocs librarians need to be thinking about how that sort of transformation  will affect their ability to help users in the future. 

jim

Editors Note: Questions were reformatted on separate lines to aid dialog.

John, Thank you for starting this conversation. I teach a GovDocs course at Pratt Institute, School of Library and Information Science. I can therefore not comment from the perspective of “those of you who use government information resources out there” but only as someone who teaches the course. Like you, I struggle with many of the same questions of emphasis and content. I have found over the years that as new items and perspectives are added to the course, nothing seems to be taken out. New is added to the old but does not replace it, but the semester is still fifteen classes and fitting everything in is a challenge.

Allow me to list, in no specific order, some questions, lessons and observations I have about teaching a Government Documents course.

1. The textbook is a challenge. Morehead is from 1999, and is out of date with respect to sources. Many of the items it mentions are on CD-ROM, many of the commercial tools are no longer produced by the same publisher and so on. It is still helpful in terms of background information and is used in my class, but only in conjunction with other books from Schmeckebier (yes, particularly for historical developments) to Sears and Moody (great as a manual but lacks in background and theory). I am therefore using a mix of book chapters and journal article primarily for concept, processes, and background (the more theoretical aspects) of the course. As for resources, I have developed an annotated bibliography that provides students with handy and up to date information about the tools of the trade, and this list is updated every semester.

2. The collections are a challenge. Pratt is not a depository, and my student work primarily at New York Public Library, or New York University. NYPL is for the most part a closed stack collection and for the most part of fiche. I find that when student do not get exposure to the physical materials they have a hard time grasping the magnitude of the various sets, as well as the differences between them. The fact that many libraries in our area (I will refrain from naming them) are sending their print collection to remote storage, makes teaching more difficult.

3. In the past I taught this course with the goal of preparing students to work as govdoc librarians. Over the past 2-3 year I am doing less of that (i.e., less about managing a depository collection) and placing more emphasis on government materials as sources for ready reference and research. This is because not only do libraries have less designated govdoc librarians, but also because more of my students end up working in non traditional environments where their primary use of government sources is for research and reference, and less actually manage a document collection.

4. IGO, NGO and foreign materials are of increasing importance, so much so that the one class on U.N. sources I traditionally had in the course did not satisfy students’ needs and we now teach a separate course called International Information Sources.

5. Some of the example you mentioned (e-government & civil liberties in particular) are only motioned in passing, not because they are not important, but because they are so important that I feel they deserve more in-depth treatment. Since the course can only cover so much, e-government gets much more attention in the International Information Sources course and in the Information Policy course (which of course deal with different aspects of e-government), and civil liberties is studied in depth in the Information Policy course.

6. There is growing demand for local government sources, particularly those relating to New York City with regard to real-estate, zoning, education, diversity. I am expanding that part of the course.

7. Finally, I would like to see more interaction between my students and the communities of practice. I often feel guilty asking librarians to mentor students or to be guest speaker because we all have so many professional commitments. I must commend some of the librarians in my area (Erminio D'Oonofrio (NYPL), Jeanne Rehberg (NYU), Gretchen Gano (NYU) Nancy McComber (QC) who have been very helpful. I am hoping for more input from the field and have planned a meeting of New York area Government Document SIG to be held at Pratt in September, where I hope to get feedback on exactly this question – what is the best way to teach GovDocs these days.

I could go on and on, but faculty meeting is in 10 minutes! Debbie

Hi Debbie,

I want to thank you for joining the conversation and for sharing your challenges in teaching government information. I think you're onto something by shifting away from depository management towards government information sources as reference in your course. Speaking as somebody who has trained two Federal Depository Library coordinators, I can teach them the stuff out of the Depository Handbook and give them some management philosophy pretty quickly. But experience and COMFORT with federal materials doesn't seem as easy to impart. Anything they can learn and experience in grad school is thus a plus for me as a manager supervising depository coordinators. Anyone else have a different view?

I'd also like to touch on questions 1, 6 and 7 you mention above.

1) Textbooks and other resources - I was wondering how much use you're making of the GODORT Handout Exchange at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Exchange? I know of a number of librarians who find it helpful and a quick browse through found a number of materials more recent than 2003. In addition to having your students absorb information from it, it might make for good class projects to register for the GODORT Wiki and revise older guides or add new content. I know it can't replace a good updated book, but I wonder if any one book can keep up with the changes in docs librarianship.

6) Growing demand for local government resources - I don't envy you teaching that, but agree it's growing in importance. I think it would be great if you and other instructors shared how you are teaching that. With tens of thousands of local jurisdictions in the US, I tend to throw up my hands at everything outside Alaska. It be good to know if there are generalizable tips.

7) Mentoring/Guest speakers - Have you thought of holding online text chats like some newspapers and government agencies do? Or perhaps take a page from LISRadio and do an internet based call in show with guest docs librarians from around the country? That might reduce the burden on local area documents librarians. Free services like Talkshoe or BlogTalkRadio might be good resources for this as well.

Thanks again to contribution to this conversation. - Daniel

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"And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them." -- Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.

Hey John,

As usual, you raise interesting questions.  While I have not formally taught a class as yet (I hope to someday), I think that most students interested in documents today are hoping to learn more about the policy framework of information and how that shapes library service including egovernment.  One of the challenges of our profession is creating a cohesive definition of egovernment that includes services, information, research, and policy. 

Your three questions start framing the conversation but I would expand the conversation to include how government literate should your students be at the end of your class? Given that you have precious little time to teach the basics,it is always astonishing to me how few really understand the importance of knowing how our government works (or is supposed to work).  The entire checks & balances idea, plus how local and state governments work along with the role of the federal government permeates all we do regardless if the information is digital or tangible.  Once we throw in NGOs, international, and foreign governments, they are completely lost.

Debbie raises some really good points about the lack of a comprehensive general text book (which I hope inspires someone to create) that addresses the needs of today's and future generations.  I think the courses do need to expose the students to management of depository collections, but no longer need to make that the focus of the course.

I agree that more time needs to be spent on local & global government information and for those who will be working in a variety of places during their careers.  I believe that the latest estimate is that someone entering the work place today can count on having 7 separate careers (when I graduated from college with my bachelors, it was 3 careers, with my graduate degree it increased to 5 -- I guest time will tell!)

I hope this helps and thanks again for starting the conversation!  Aimee

I teach the gov docs class at Emporia State University.  Last year I had to switch to an online format which was an even greater challenge!  I am including the course description and goals.

Course Description:

This course will explore issues, policies, and resources in the area of government information.  The structure of the U.S. government and the relationship to information generation, organization, dissemination and retrieval will be emphasized.  The goal of this course is to provide a solid knowledge base for new librarians and information professionals working with government information in a reference setting or in a federal depository library.

Students will:

• Become familiar with both historical and current production and dissemination of government information.

• Gain a working knowledge of the Superintendent of Documents (SuDocs) Classification System.
• Gain an understanding and value of the information generated by the legislative, executive, and judicial process and the methods of retrieving this information.
• Learn strategies for using government information sources to respond to reference questions.

I use John's book for the course with supplemental readings from Morehead, Robinson, and Sears and Moody plus some articles.  There was an interesting review in the latest issue of DttP for the following:

Government Documents Librarianship: A Guide for the Neo-Depository
Era. Lisa A. Ennis. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc., 2007. $49.50. ISBN
978-1-57387-270-6.

I want to look this book over and might include it for the class.

My mantra for this class is "know the structure to find the information." Who are the producers of federal information starting with the three branches of government?  What information may or may not be produced?  I cover bibliographic control and how to find federal information and how federal information is disseminated -- spending time with egovernment comes in here.

This is a very relevant topic for me.  I will be teaching the class online again this summer. 

Thanks!

Anne Liebst

This is a challenge not only to those who teach Library Science students but non-depository librarians as well. There is such a tremendous amount of information in government documents it is almost impossible to teach all.

I am very excited about the efforts by the Web Junction project going on out in Colorado because this will allow modules on specific subjects to be available for all sorts of teaching opportunities as well as content. I believe that this will allow documents librarians to teach about electronic and print materials in the same venue. They are still in the middle of developing this train-the trainer project so we will probably be hearing about the outcomes soon.

John, An interesting question but since I don’t teach government information I am hesitant to weigh in on specific topics that students should cover in class. But your question did force me to think back over my own career and consider what was the most helpful of topics covered in library school. I think what I have come to value the most about my own coursework was the emphasis that was always present on making a commitment to the profession. Similarly, I hope that your students would leave your class with a commitment to the profession and to the government information community. I was extremely fortunate to work with the wonderful Joan Durrance when I attended University of Michigan. Although I can’t recall her ever saying it outright Professor Durrance instilled in us a sense of responsibility to the community we were seeking to join. I left her docs class not just interested in documents but convinced of the importance of access to government information and committed to ensuring it. “Professionalism” isn’t something that can be taught really but modeled; it comes from mentors and fine teachers, like you John, who are committed to the profession. What do I think you should teach to government information students – t hat our profession and our cause is a noble one. I think that you (and others who teach government information) are in a unique position to not just teach the content and resources but to nurture that sense of commitment that will help us to create professional leaders for our future. Cheers, Bill Sleeman

Hi John,

Thanks for creating what I think has been our most active discussion thread on FGI and for the issues raised by you and the folks who have been commenting.

I definitely have to disagree with you when you say:,

-- the formats or forums where these govenment information objects might appear (or distributed) has become less important to me. As I told the students -- I am going to try to teach them how to be the best librarians who can find government information, not the best government information librarians.

Location does matter and so does format. If the location is behind a fee barrier or on a centralized server that can revoke "authentic" copies at the flip of a switch, we have no information for librarians to find.

If a document is formatted using DRM, librarians and others don't have full use of the information contained in it. If maps are locked in a closed proprietary format, then researchers a decade from now won't be able to view them.

Today's students and librarians need to understand these issues of location and format in order to ensure access and privacy to government information. Otherwise, we put ourselves and our patrons at the mercy of third parties. Librarians won't stand for that in their general collections. Why should government information be different?

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"And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them." -- Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.

Thanks John for facilitating this interesting topic. I'm sure many of our readers are thinking back to their documents classes to analyze how their class(es) prepared them (or didn't :-) ) for their work lives. I was *mostly* well-prepared for life as a documents librarian (many thanks Mary Mallory!!), learning the primary reference tools and common reference questions at the various levels of govt. The gaps in my class had nothing to do with my instructor, but were things that I had to learn on the job, to apply my research skills and conscience, learn and apply technical skills etc to solving problems that have only arisen in the last 10 years. I would describe the gap as philosophical-technical in nature and say that it rests between pedagogy and practice.

So I would say that gap would be a good place to start in getting librarians ready for work in a reality where fewer and fewer will be pure documents librarians. Documents librarians are the canaries in the coalmine in terms of the issues we've been dealing with that are only now beginning to be seen by librarians in other areas. Therefore, your instruction and the topics you bring up can go a long way in informing students about the field in general and helping to better prepare students for the work ahead in whatever aspect they choose to pursue.

With that said, here are a few ideas, both philosophical and practical:

1. format doesn't matter; libraries still need to build collections. Many libraries are in the process of building digital repositories and digital documents are a particularly robust field of content due to their interdisciplinary coverage and relatively straightforward copyright issues. By collecting digitally, we help to inform the wider library field about issues, tecnologies and best practices.
2. engage in the philosophical debate about our field's future. Assign "Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program" as a class reading. whether or not you agree with its theses and conclusions, it clearly maps out the current state of documents and at least one possible future.
3. Help to build new bibliographic tools and collaborate with already occurring digital projects. There are a plethora of collaborative Web services and technologies that can help in the collection, access, preservation of government information --delicious, Google custom search engine, LOCKSS, Archive-it to name just a few.
4. Introduce your students to work that documents librarians are doing. GODORT and the GODORT wiki is a great place to start! There are at least 2 projects (state agency databases project and IGO publishing policies and practices) currently happening on the wiki that could be used in the classroom. The wiki has the added benefit of actually getting students involved with a new way of community collaboration, at least a virtual connection to practitioners from around the country, and first hand experience with GODORT and the documents community.
5. The field of government information is fertile space for so many other classes. Encourage students to use this field for classes and projects on collection development, technology, research methods, library management, archives etc. Students are students after all, and are therefore always looking for topics to kill 2 birds with one stone!

John,

I'd like to add one more comment on the same topic that Daniel identified earlier.

...the formats or forums where these govenment information objects might appear (or distributed) has become less important to me. As I told the students -- I am going to try to teach them how to be the best librarians who can find government information, not the best government information librarians.

As James pointed out, it is possible to say "formats don't matter." But it is also possible to say, as Daniel did that formats do matter! My guess is that you (and most folks who read these comments) agree with most of what Daniel and James said. But how can formats both matter and not matter?

1. Formats do not matter. We have to help people find and get and use information and, to the extent that we are not in control of the format of the information "format does not matter" to us. We have to be able to deal with print and many digital formats.
2. Formats do matter. Formats affect how (or whether) we find information. The retrieval mechanisms and their functionality differ greatly for an html page, a pdf document, a scanned print document, a dynamic web page, a database, an entry in a database, a book, a pamphlet, etc. etc. We must be able to deal with those differences and not treat them all as if they were the same.
3. Formats do not matter. As James said, we should be building digital collections. The fact that a particular piece of government information is in a digital format should not automatically exclude our considering it for our collection. We should be building digital collections for many of the same reasons we built paper collections. These include, but are not limited to: preservation and redundancy (Lots Of Copies do Keep more Stuff Safe than one copy does); authenticity (every copy of a document that exists increases the difficulty of intentionally or unintentionally altering the content of that document without the alteration being identifiable); and that fact that subject-specific collections that include government and non-government information can make it easier to find appropriate information than collections built around provenance.
4. Formats do matter. Like it or not, different formats have strengths and weaknesses and we have to be able to pick the format of information content that best suits a particular need. For one person, the retrieval of a single fact (a phone number, a name, a date, a statistic) will suffice, while another person will require a database of phone numbers, a census data file, a GIS file, etc.

We can all come up with lists of how formats do/do-not matter. The point is larger than this, though.

One take-away I'd suggest for your class, given the above, is to be active and not passive. Librarians are in a unique position to understand the needs of users and the requirements of information dissemination that will ensure its find-ability, preservability, and usability. We should demand what is necessary of our government information creation and distribution channels, not just accept whatever is given us and try to deal with it after the fact. We should demand open formats (e.g., ODF), appropriate formats (including in some cases print and digital), distribution of digital government information to FDLP libraries, the ability to use and reuse information (e.g., no DRM or licensing restrictions); and more.

I believe that we should be training librarians to do a lot more than just be able to "find government information." We have to be able to select, acquire, organize, and preserve it and provide services for it and make it usable and re-usable. Anyone can help someone find information; only a library can ensure that it will be findable and usable for the long-term.

Please note: The comment below comes from Amy West, Data Services Librarian at University of Minnesota Libraries.

>>>>>>>>>>>
John,

I would think it's key to structure classes to account for the fact that most people in them will not be government documents librarians. That doesn't mean that we can't make the very same lessons relevant in broader contexts.

There's not a single non-docs collection issue that has come up in the last two years that I've been going to collections meetings here that hasn't already been dealt with in our docs collection. When it comes to managing, preserving, cataloging and providing access to multi-format collections, we've been there, cataloged, marked, shelved and circulated that.

Librarians looking for data to test new technologies on would particularly benefit from a docs class because government data (used broadly here to include any structured content, whether text or numeric, e.g. Congressional Record or Census data) equals data without copyright or fee restrictions. Much of it also lends itself to spatial representation and much of it contains enough anomalies to really test a new interface.

Librarians teaching information literacy can also use government information as content for lesson plans for the same reasons as above and because of additional fun complications like "Is it official?" and "How do you know it wasn't hacked today? and "How am I going to cite this table from American FactFinder"?

There are loads of additional examples (of course), but these areas are ones receiving a lot of scrutiny at the UMN these days, so I think I'll stop there so I get to my general(!) reference desk shift.

Thanks for starting the discussion!