President Obama was sworn in on January 20th, but we're still continuing the "75 days until Government Information Liberation" inspired
"Guide of the Week: Transition Issues edition until we finish all of the 13 "urgent issues" identified by the GAO.

The Government Accountability Office recently identified Retirement of the Space Shuttle as one of 13 urgent issues facing the next President and Congress. Today on Guide of the Week, we'll talk about some librarian produced guides from the ALA GODORT Exchange Wiki that can help inform citizens, Congress and President-Elect Obama on this issue.

There appear to be two librarian-produced guides that can provide information about the Space Shuttle and its possible successors:

• Government Documents on Space Policy (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 2001) CC Last updated 3/10/2008
• Space (University of Colorado at Boulder Government Publications Library, 2008)

Bert Chapman's guide offers guidance on how to search for documents in space transportation and provides links to the Congressional committees with oversight over the Shuttle program. He also links to the Space Shuttle mission page and to the NASA History office, which has several overview reports of the development of the Shuttle.

The UC Boulder guide is also mostly focused on general space resources, but contains a link to NASA's Technical Reports Server (NTRS) at http://ntrs.nasa.gov/, which contains many current and historical reports on the Space Shuttle and its potential successors. Strangely, it insists on sorting records in ascending date order, so for the most current reports you'll need to sort by date and then go to the end of the list.

Next week I'll be dealing with librarian produced guides relating to "Transition to Digital Television" So if you have any guides relating to that topic, please try and post them to the Handout Exchange this week.