Housing has been an issue both this year in general and as an election issue. So this week I'm highlighting another Bert Chapman guide that he allowed the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki to link to:

* Housing (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 2001) Last updated 6/18/2008

In his introduction, Bert notes:

Housing affects our lives in many ways. We buy and sell homes, rent apartments, and invest in residential and commercial properties. Government agencies produce many publications on various aspects of housing. These publications can be found in various Purdue Libraries with the HSSE and MEL libraries having the largest collections. Examples of Library Catalog subject headings you can use to search for government documents on housing include:

• Government Sale of Real Property United States
• Home Ownership United States
• Housing Policy United States
• Housing Surveys United States
• Rental Housing Law and Legislation United States

He then identifies a number of resources including:

• A Chronology of Housing Legislation & Selected Executive Actions 1892-2003 HSSE DOC Y 4.F 49/20:108-D
• American Housing Survey (various cities) HSSE DOC C 3.215:H-170/
• Census of Construction Industries MEL REF, MEL, & STOR C 3.245/
• Mortgage Insurance Companies of America/Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Reports MEL REF FR 1.63/
• Germany Federal Ministry of Transport, Building, & Housing (In German)

Check out the rest of the guide. Then see what other topics are available. And if you are a documents librarian with a guide, please add your guide to the wiki!

According to the Census Bureau, by 2030 one in five Americans, including me, will be 65 or older. It's never too early to prepare for old age, it seems like a good time to highlight this guide linked from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange:

Selected Bibliography of Gerontology Resources in the Social Work Library, with Selected Web Resources (Sally Haines Lawler, University of Michigan, 2003) Last updated 9/26/2006

The scope note (introduction) to the guide emphasizes that this list is not comprehensive and that people should contact library staff for additional resources. While not comprehensive, the guide is pretty extensive with lists of books, journals, databases, web sites and more. A too brief sample of what's available includes:

• Andersson, L. (Ed.). (2002). Cultural gerontology. Westport, Conn.: Auburn House. HQ 1061 .C7931 2002
• Birren, J.E. (2001). Telling the stories of life through guided autobiography groups. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. RC 953.8 .R43 B5751 2001
• American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. Albany, NY: American Orthopsychiatric Association

  * Full text available only to U-M students; available on campus at Social Work Library (1988-present), Shapiro Undergraduate Library (1980-present)
  * Indexed in: AGELINE, Psychological Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, Social Work Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts

• AGELINE

  Conduct a subject search for gerontology. Also try subject searches for social gerontology, geropsychology, psychological aging, biological aging, successful aging, older adults, old old, and young old. Try to be as specific as possible in this database, as it covers aging and older adults, in particular the social, psychological, economic, policy and health care aspects. For additional information, see the Social Work Library's guide "How to Search CSA Illumina."

• http://www.americangeriatrices.org/ American Geriatrics Society.

Aside from the extensive list of resources, the guide also offers a number of search terms to use when searching gerontology issues in library catalogs. Some of the terms offered are: Aged offenders, Frail elderly, Hospice care, Rural aged, and Terminal care.

Check out the rest of the guide. Then see what other topics are available. And if you are a documents librarian with a guide, please add your guide to the wiki!

Since energy policy has been in the news most of this year, it seems like a good time to highlight this guide from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange:

Energy (Ed Herman, University of Buffalo, 2007)

Ed has produced an annotated listing of web resources to these aspects of energy:

• National Policy Issues
• US Statistics
• Technical Information
• Nuclear Energy
• New York State
• International Data
• Additional Information

Some of the specific resources he includes are:

• The Energy Source (U.S. Congress. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources)
  http://energy.senate.gov/
  The hearings and news room sections are the most informative parts of this site. These abbreviated hearings reproduce testimonies of witnesses before the full committee and the subcommittees, but exclude dialogs among the witnesses and the Committee members. The Business and Government Documents Reference Center maintains the complete hearings in paper format. The news room includes two sets of press releases issued by the Committee Chair and the ranking minority member.

• States (U.S. Department of Energy. Energy Information Administration)
  http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/states/_seds.html
  Presents energy statistics pertaining to the 50 states.

• Building Energy Codes (U.S. Department of Energy. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy)
  http://www.energycodes.gov/
  Attempts to promote improved energy codes for buildings by working with government agencies, national code organizations, and industry. It also hopes to develop and distribute compliance tools; and provide financial and technical assistance to states.

• Nuclear Power Information Tracker (Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS))
  http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/nuclear_safety/reactor-map/embedded-flash-map.html
  Select power plants from a map or a list to view a brief box that describes safety issues and a detailed statement that cites the reactor's owners, locations, populations within a 10-mile radius, and safety issues. Links lead to more detailed documentation.

• International Energy Annual (U.S. Department of Energy. Energy Information Administration)
  http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/iea/contents.html
  Provides information and trends on world energy production and consumption for petroleum; natural gas; coal; and electricity. Statistics measuring population and GDP put the data in context. View information in PDF format or download Excel files that offer longer time series.

Check out the rest of the guide. Then see what other topics are available. And if you are a documents librarian with a guide, please add your guide to the wiki!

One of the harder to find classes of government documents are declassified documents. In many cases these are not within the scope of the Federal Depository Library Program, so there isn't a centralized place to find them. Sometimes they're not actual publications, but stuff like memos, celebrity FBI files and the like. If you're researching public policy, especially national security, stuff that might be helpful might be declassified or subject to declassification under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). But before you start filing that FOIA request, check out today's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange, because what you want might already be out there:

Declassified Government Documents (UC-Berkeley, 2004) CC Last updated 9/15/2006

I really like how this guide starts out. Because the Berkeley librarians understand that declassified documents are a misty topic to most people, they start with an introduction:

About Declassified Documents

Documents may be classified for many reasons - issues of national security or privacy. A popular misconception is that when a document is declassified, it is somehow systematically made available to the public, for example, distributed to depository libraries. This is most often not the case. Exceptions to this might be

• a highly-publicized document is published as a part of an investigation. E.g. The Munson Report, a report from the fall of 1941 stemming from an intelligence gathering investigation on the loyalty of Japanese Americans is one of these exceptions. It was declassified and published as one of the many appendices in the Hearings held by the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack in 1946.
• a document series that is specifically published by the government for researchers (e.g. Foreign Relations of the U.S. or the Library of Congress Presidential Papers collections).

As there are no clear patterns of publication for most declassified documents, it falls to the researcher interested in a document that is declassified to research which agency created the document, who may have researched the document originally, and where it might be now. The guides and resources shown below are intended to assist the research in finding federal records that have been declassified as part of the routine declassification, as well as records that are declassified through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests and other kinds of investigations.

After this intro, they have additional material about the declassification process and FOIA. Then they talk about resources including:

• The encyclopedia of American intelligence and espionage : from the Revolutionary War to the present. G.J.A. O'Toole. New York : Facts on File, c1988.
  UB271.U5 O85 1988 GREF
  References individuals, committees, and operations. Many of the entries have footnotes.

• Unlocking the files of the FBI : a guide to its records and classification system by Gerald K. Haines and David A. Langbart. Wilmington, Del. : Scholarly Resources, 1993. HV8144.F43 H35 1993 GREF
• OpenNet via Department of Energy
  OpenNet includes references to all documents declassified and made publicly available after October 1, 1994. New references are added periodically as they occur. These collections include citations to several types of documents. Some have been declassified in total, and are termed "declassified." Others have had classified or other restricted information removed to produce a "sanitized" copy. The term "redacted" is sometimes used to refer to these documents.

There are a lot more. See http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/doemoff/govinfo/federal/gov_decldoc.html for details. Then check out what other subject guides are available. And if you're a docs librarian with a handout of your own, link it to the wiki!.

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.

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:

--------------

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/

-------------

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!

Last month, at ALA Annual Conference 2008, FGI volunteers participated in the GODORT preconference "Docs2.0: emerging web technologies for the government documents community". At long last, we've got the video of all the speakers up and available!! It's also available on the internet archive (slightly better quality video). You can now access all the slides, video, and notes from the preconference at the GODORT wiki.

Speakers:

• James R. Jacobs, International Documents Librarian, Stanford University. "Social tagging for building subject portals"
• Amy West, Interim Head, Government Publications Library, University of Minnesota. "Integration of 2.0 tools like Instant Messaging (IM) for reference"
• Jim A. Jacobs, Data Librarian Emeritus, University of California at San Diego. "RSS for documents librarians"
• David Oldenkamp, International Studies Librarian, Indiana University. "Custom search engines with GoogleCSE"
• John Wonderlich, Program Director, Sunlight Foundation. (keynote) Open House Project

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.

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.

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.

As you can see by the flurry of blog posts, Shinjoung and I are trying to catch up after an extremely busy week in which we helped out with the International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology (IASSIST) 34th annual Conference hosted at Stanford University. The workshops and programs (at least what I was able to attend in between running around, helping attendees get settled and work out their technology issues, helping to stream the video into Second Life ...) were extremely interesting. I even got to talk for a few minutes to Catherine Ruggles, one of the plenary speakers, who's the daughter of Richard Ruggles. I told her about scanning the 1965 report from the Social Science Research Council chaired by her father, which seemed to please her!

Now I'll have just enough time to catch up on sleep and then it'll be off to Anaheim for the ALA annual conference. I'll be hosting a preconference called Docs2.0, leading a session on digital collections at the International Documents Taskforce (IDTF) meeting, participating in the Publications Committee (anybody want to be the new editor for Documents to the People (DttP) (.doc) or write an article for the new GODORT occasional paper series?!) and generally being in 2 places at once the whole weekend. Please say hi! if you see me running around. There's always time to chat :-)

ALA annual conference is coming up and there are a couple of GODORT preconferences that may be of interest to FGI readers. Since they're on different days, you could attend both!

Want to learn more about Web2.0 technologies and documents librarianship? There's still time to register for the GODORT pre-conference "Docs2.0: emerging web technologies for the government documents community" at ALA Annual conference in Anaheim, Friday, June 27, 2008, 9:00am – 12:30. The 1/2 day preconference will be chock full of both hands-on work and discussion about Web2.0 tools and how they can be used to help documents librarians with their collections and services. FGI volunteers Jim Jacobs and James Jacobs will be presenting about RSS and del.icio.us; Additional speakers on the slate are Amy West, David Oldenkamp, and the keynote will be John Wonderlich, Program Director of the Sunlight Foundation.

The other preconference of interest is entitled, "Got Elections? Informing the Public" on Thursday, June 26, 8:30am - 4:30pm. This is cosponsored by GODORT, ACRL, and LPSS.

At this lively full-day workshop with nationally recognized speakers, attendees will learn Who Decides? (Information on Voters), Who Runs? (Information on Candidates), Who Cares? (Information on Issues), and Who Wins? (Information on Election Results). Help library and online users make sense of the information they find. Transportation will be provided from the Convention Center.

Location: California State University Fullerton, Pollak Library, 800 N State College Blvd.

Speakers: Rhodes Cook, Political Analyst, RhodesCook. com; Stephen Woods, Social Sciences Librarianm Pennsylvania State University; Chris Palazzolo, Librarian for Political Science & International Documents, Emory University; John Hernandez, Politics and U.S. Documents Librarian, Princeton University; Erik Estep, North Carolina Reference Librarian, East Carolina University; Jerry Wong, Information Services Specialist, U.S. Census Bureau

Tickets: Advance: GODORT Member: $125; ALA Member: $150; Non-Member: $200; Student/ Retired Member: $100. Onsite: GODORT Member: $140; ALA Member: $165; Non-Member: $215; Student/Retired Member: $115
Event Code: GO1

Bill Sleeman, chair of the ALA Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT), recently posted the minutes to the GPO / GODORT Steering Conference Call of March 12, 2008. These conference calls take place from time to time and often have news of value. The minutes can be found (may have to scroll) at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/GODORT_Chair and covered the following topics, among others:

• Request for Information for Mass Digitization Opportunities
• Status of EPA Web Harvesting
• Status of the Federal Digital System (FDSys)
• Addition of pre-1976 cataloging to the Catalog of Government Publications - in progress.
• Continued distance ed through OPAL
• Current stats on the newish Government Information Online reference service.

If I were you, I'd look over the entire set of minutes as it was all interesting. I'd like to highlight two issues, both of which cry out for the documents community to do more to support GPO in some of its efforts:

EPA Web Harvest Project

Here are the notes on this subject (full names available from minutes page):

LH & RHM: Status of EPA harvesting project: GPO worked through 300 of the documents to gather information on what it will take for GPO to provide access to harvested materials (process, workflow and staffing implications). So far: the back end automation of meta-data extraction is not ready; parameters for metadata that accompanies the files needs improvement to automate de-duping; and the rules, methods and mechanisms for harvesting need to be refined (approximately 28% of material was not in scope). Basically, it is still taking more staff time to make these available than GPO can afford. BS asked about the FGI taxonomy experiment and if GPO would be investigating the results of that effort. GPO may incorporate that information into the project as the project moves forward.

GPO's results of automated harvesting finding a lot of out of scope material and difficult automated extraction of metadata are about what I expected based on my own experience and from my reading of the literature. Whether or not GPO builds on our modest taxonomy experiment (Thanks Bill!), I think that a GPO - community/citizen collaboration will be needed to begin getting a handle on web-based agency documents. They could start simply by publishing their spidering logs and see what happens. Or perhaps they can obtain some of the $2 Billion/week currently being spent elsewhere. If GPO choose to take the mass collaboration route, I hope the documents community is in the forefront of helping them.

If you're interested in taking part in our tagging experiment, please see http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging. We will be running the project through April 18, 2008. To see what has been tagged so far, please visit http://del.icio.us/tag/epapilotproject.

OPAL Training

Here are the notes on this subject:

LC: OPAL, GPO continues to use OPAL for online training and demos. At present, technical capabilities limit presentations to slide shows, such as PowerPoint presentations. Interactive web functions will be added in the future. January call for participation in creation of tutorials netted one submission; hoping to generate interest at DLC.

The FDLP has over 1200 libraries and GPO got ONE SUBMISSION? A majority of FDLP libraries are teaching oriented academic libraries and GPO got ONE SUBMISSION?

Hello! I know I'm not the only one who has insisted that GPO provide training between conferences for those of us who don't get out much. The documents community has a great reservoir of government information expertise. We should be actively aiding GPO in their efforts to spread that expertise.

I admit that GPO's one submission wasn't from my library. I have a pretty new docs staff that's still getting up to speed. But that can't be the case everywhere. If only 10% of FDLP libraries could step up with a program, that would still be 120 programs -- twice a week for a whole year.

Just so I can at least pretend to put my money (or staff time) where my mouth is, I will spend some time next month looking at our library's gov info information strengths, our customer needs and patron interests. And then sometime during the summer I or someone else from our library will submit a program. If you run a depository, will you commit to doing the same? Not only does GPO need our help, so do our colleagues.

FGI thanks the GODORT and GPO personnel who participated, Jill Vassilakos-Long for taking the minutes and Bill for posting them to the ALA GODORT Wiki.

We at FGI are trying to get the word out about the GODORT pre-conference "Docs2.0: emerging web technologies for the government documents community" at ALA Annual conference in Anaheim, Friday, June 27, 2008, 9:00am – 12:30. Registration is now open and seating is limited to 35. So do it now! (FGI is bringing speakers and refreshments!!). For further questions, email James at jrjacobs AT stanford DOT edu.

This program will highlight tools like wikis, blogs, social tagging, custom search engines, flickr and other Web services, and will focus on how these new technologies can enhance library services. Speakers will highlight projects and give hands-on training to set up and administer these services. Attendees will leave the program with knowledge of tools to help them collaborate, build Web collections, and better connect with their users, as well as having real examples of projects to use as templates. Transportation will be provided from the Convention Center.

Speakers:

• James R. Jacobs, International Documents Librarian, Stanford University. "Social tagging for building subject portals"
• Amy West, Interim Head, Government Publications Library, University of Minnesota. "Integration of 2.0 tools like Instant Messaging (IM) for reference"
• Jim A. Jacobs, Data Librarian Emeritus, University of California at San Diego. "RSS for documents librarians"
• David Oldenkamp, International Studies Librarian, Indiana University. "Custom search engines with GoogleCSE"
• John Wonderlich, Program Director, Sunlight Foundation. (keynote) Open House Project

Tickets:
Advance: GODORT Member: $100; ALA Member: $125; Non-Member: $175; Student/ Retired Member: $75.
Onsite: GODORT Member: $125; ALA Member: $150; Non-Member: $200; Student/Retired Member: $100
Event Code: GO2

Go here to register. You'll be glad you did!!