A posting in Slashdot has information about the new UN data access system called UNdata that contains information from all major UN databases and those of several other international organizations. UNdata will improve the dissemination of statistics by UN's Statistics Division (UNSD) to the widest possible audience. It is an easy to use data access system that was developed to meet UNSD’s vision of providing an integrated information resource with current, relevant and reliable statistics free of charge to the global community. The design allows a user to access a large number of UN databases either by browsing the data series or through a keyword search.

Last year, Linda Zellmer from the University of Indiana, sent out an update to a Thanksgiving poster that details statistics for the various crops served during a Thanksgiving meal.  I immediately printed it out and it is currently on a wall iin the Maps Area.  The information comes from the Economic Census and it arose a great deal of curiosity from patrons.  I am sure Linda will update it once the 2007 Economic Census statistics are available in a couple of years.

The Census Bureau also publishes annually statistics about Thanksgiving Day.  Here's the information for 2007.

Thanksgiving Day
Nov. 22, 2007

In the fall of 1621, the religious separatist Pilgrims held a three-day feast to celebrate a bountiful harvest, an event many regard as the nation’s first Thanksgiving. It eventually became a national holiday in 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November as a national day of thanksgiving. Later, President Franklin Roosevelt clarified that Thanksgiving should always be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of the month to encourage earlier holiday shopping, never on the occasional fifth Thursday.

272 million
The preliminary estimate of turkeys raised in the United States in 2007. That’s up 4 percent from 2006. The turkeys produced in 2005 together weighed 7.2 billion pounds and were valued at $3.2 billion.
Source: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service
http://www.nass.usda.gov/

Weighing in With a Menu of Culinary Delights

46 million
The preliminary estimate of turkeys Minnesota expects to raise in 2007. The Gopher State is tops in turkey production. It is followed by North Carolina (39 million), Arkansas (31 million), Virginia (21.5 million), Missouri (21 million) and California (16.8 million). These six states together will probably account for about two-thirds of U.S. turkeys produced in 2007.

690 million pounds
The forecast for U.S. cranberry production in 2007, essentially unchanged from 2006 and 11 percent more than 2005. Wisconsin is expected to lead all states in the production of cranberries, with 390 million pounds, followed by Massachusetts (180 million). New Jersey, Oregon and Washington are also expected to have substantial production, ranging from 18 million to 52 million pounds.

1.6 billion pounds
The total weight of sweet potatoes — another popular Thanksgiving side dish — produced by major sweet potato producing states in 2006. North Carolina (702 million pounds) produced more sweet potatoes than any other state. It was followed by California (381 million pounds). Mississippi and Louisiana also produced large amounts: at least 200 million pounds each.

1 billion pounds
Total pumpkin production of major pumpkin-producing states in 2006. Illinois led the country by producing 492 million pounds of the vined orange gourd. Pumpkin patches in California, Ohio and Pennsylvania also provided plenty of pumpkins: Each state produced at least 100 million pounds. The value of all the pumpkins produced by major pumpkin-producing states was $101 million.

If you prefer cherry pie, you will be pleased to learn that the nation’s forecasted tart cherry production for 2007 totals 294 million pounds. Of this total, the overwhelming majority (230 million) will be produced in Michigan.

1.8 billion bushels
The total volume of wheat — the essential ingredient of bread, rolls and pie crust — produced in the United States in 2006. Kansas and North Dakota accounted for 30 percent of the nation’s wheat production.

841,280 tons
The 2007 contracted production of snap (green) beans in major snap (green) bean-producing states. Of this total, Wisconsin led all states (310,200 tons). Many Americans consider green bean casserole a traditional Thanksgiving dish.
Source: The previous data come from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service http://www.nass.usda.gov/

$9.5 million
The value of U.S. imports of live turkeys during the first half of 2007 — 99.5 percent from Canada. Our northern neighbor accounted for all of the cranberries the United States imported ($2.2 million). When it comes to sweet potatoes, however, the Dominican Republic was the source of 63 percent ($1.7 million) of total imports ($2.7 million). The United States ran a $4.9 million trade deficit in live turkeys during the period but had surpluses of $9.4 million in cranberries and $15.3 million in sweet potatoes.
Source: Foreign Trade Statistics http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/www

13.1 pounds
The quantity of turkeys consumed by the typical American in 2005, with a hearty helping devoured at Thanksgiving time. Per capita sweet potato consumption was 4.5 pounds.
Source: Upcoming Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2008, Tables 205-206 http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/

An Organic Feast

144,086
Number of certified organic turkeys on the nation’s farmland, as of 2005. Most of these turkeys were in Michigan (56,729) or Pennsylvania (48,815).
Source: USDA Economic Research Service
http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/organic/

The Turkey Industry

$3.6 billion
The value of turkeys shipped in 2002. Arkansas led the way in turkey shipments, with $581.5 million, followed by Virginia ($544.2 million) and North Carolina ($453 million). In 2002, poultry businesses whose primary product was turkey totaled 35 establishments, employing about 17,000 people.
Source: Poultry Processing: 2002 http://www.census.gov/prod/ec02/ec0231i311615.pdf

$3.86 billion
Forecast 2007 receipts to farmers from turkey sales. This exceeds the total receipts from sales of products such as rice, peanuts and tobacco.
Source: USDA Economic Research Service http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/farmincome/finfidmu.htm

The Price is Right

99 cents
Cost per pound of a frozen whole turkey in December 2006.
Source: Upcoming Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2008, Table 709 http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/

Where to Feast

3
Number of places in the United States named after the holiday’s traditional main course. Turkey, Texas, was the most populous in 2006, with 489 residents; followed by Turkey Creek, La. (363); and Turkey, N.C. (270). There also are nine townships around the country named Turkey, three in Kansas.
Source: Population estimates http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/010315.html, http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/BasicFactsServlet

8
Number of places and townships in the United States that are named Cranberry or some spelling variation of the red, acidic berry (e.g., Cranbury, N.J.), a popular side dish at Thanksgiving. Cranberry township (Butler County), Pa., was the most populous of these places in 2006, with 27,509 residents. Cranberry township (Venango County), Pa., was next (6,900).
Source: Population estimates http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/BasicFactsServlet
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/010315.html

28
Number of places in the United States named Plymouth, as in Plymouth Rock, the landing site of the first Pilgrims. Plymouth, Minn., is the most populous, with 70,102 residents in 2006; Plymouth, Mass., had 55,516. Speaking of Plymouth Rock, there is just one township in the United States named “Pilgrim.” Located in Dade County, Mo., its population was 135.
Source: Population estimates http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/010315.html, http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/BasicFactsServlet

114.4 million
Number of households across the nation — all potential gathering places for people to celebrate the holiday.
Source: Families and Living Arrangements: 2006 http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/families_households/009842.html

Editor’s note: The preceding data were collected from a variety of sources and may be subject to sampling variability and other sources of error. Facts for Features are customarily released about two months before an observance in order to accommodate magazine production timelines. Questions or comments should be directed to the Census Bureau’s Public Information Office: telephone: 301-763-3030; fax: 301-763-3762; or e-mail: <pio@census.gov>.

Happy Thanksgiving!! 

Now that I had some statistics it dawned on me I had no idea whether or not this was a lot documents.  So I was off to the FDLP desktop and the  Catalog of U.S. Government Publications.

I looked around the desktop to see if GPO listed any statistics.  On the "about" page for the CGP, GPO says merely that there are more than 500,000 records in the database.  So I gave some thought to how I might get a better figure, and off I went to OCLC and the GPO database in FirstSearch.  On the database info page, OCLC lists 507,000+ as the number of records and that the database had its last monthly update on August 8, 2007.

So I went back to the CGP and its advance search page.  Searching for GPO in the publisher field is not terribly effective.  Of course, in this database everything is a government document so that is not a problem. 

But how to get a real number out of the database?  I tried using the most common of words--a and the-- but to no great effect.  A brings up 359,875 records and the brings up 411,493.  Neither result comes close enough to the supposed 507,000.

I had another realization that the CGP now includes records for electronic titles--titles that would not be fodder for the Google Book Project. Using the New Electronic Titles page is not really an option to count them as it only goes back to April of 2005 and since early 2006 the monthly lists are not numbered (leaving me to do a lot of counting).

So back to the advanced searching page in the CGP.  Happily here you can search for terms in the URL/PURL. I proceeded to search for every record that listed .gov, .mil, .us, .org, and .com. I came up with a total of 64,504 records.  So approximately 13% of the records in the CGP are electronic titles or are titles with an electronic counterpart.

Unfortunately I had another realization that these figures really only represent documents published from 1976 on. This is a really big problem in that most of the documents I found in Google Books dated to before 1923.  My only hope to get good numbers was to askGPO.  So late on August 8th I shot off a query to GPO asking for statistics on the number of documents GPO has distributed both before and after 1976.

Surprisingly enough, GPO called me first thing the next morning. askGPO is notoriously slow in providing answers to queries so I was very surprised!  I spoke with Nancy Faget at GPO and she was very pleasant though not exactly forthcoming with numbers.  It struck me that I got the quick call back as GPO viewed my query as the first step in getting out of the program.  As far as I know my director has no real intentions of doing that, but I don't think I convinced her on that point.  But aside from that she told me that GPO really didn't know how many documents went to depositories since the beginning.  Alas!!

I honestly don't know if would be fair to take the view that probably as much was distributed from 1813 to 1976 as was published after 1976.  But if you did, that would lead to believe that over one million documents have been produced.

So the bigger picture suggests that the 167,878 titles in Google Books is only about 17% of all the documents that could be digitized.  At a guess...

So I put a call out to everyone in GovDoc Land.  If you are a full depository and have been one since 1813 and have kept really good records, could you please send me the statistics?  Thank you very kindly in advance!

Having found no published statistics for numbers of digitized books in Google Books, and especially nothing about digitized government publications, I was left with coming up with them on my own.

So I went to the Advanced Book Search screen for Google Books.  Looking at the search options provided there I decided that the only way I could get reasonably useful statistics was to search for books published by GPO.  As you are all aware not all government documents are actually published by GPO. Many are merely distributed by them.  So I knew that my numbers would not be exact.  Another problem was that over the years GPO listed themselves as publishers using a variety of abbreviations and phrases.

My first try was to use GPO  in publisher and on August 8th I retrieved 141,600 hits. However just now when I ran it again, I only got 117,600. Hmmm.

Next search was for Government Printing Office, which retrieved both today and on the 8th, 43,600 hits.  This was followed by gov't, which on the 8th retrieved 2,322 titles but today only retrieved 2,258.

The grand total for using these three searches on August 8th was 187,522.

Today as I was double checking my results, I also tried gov. print. off. and got 4,420 hits.  So as of this morning the grand total is 167,878.  I find it rather disconcerting that the number as dropped so much in nine days!

I have a hard time trying to figure out where to begin this blog, so I have decided to start at the beginning even though I have written a bit about this in a message posted to GOVDOC-L on August 8th. So here goes...

I was asked to find out how much government information is available in the various Googles.  Over the past few months I had saved posts from GOVDOC-L that had Google in the subject line; so I thought this would be an easy assignment.  Turns out that the messages did not give statistics, instead they were questions about Google's practice of making the full text of all books published after 1923 unavailable.

Well I was a bit disappointed but I still thought that I would find the information on Google's website. I figured that Google would be tooting its own horn about the growth of this infamous project.  Not so.  There are no statistics anywhere, and there was very little that described the scope of the project.

Next I went into research mode.  I checked for articles in EBSCO's Academic Search Premier and Lexis-Nexis.  I found some interesting news articles on the project but again no statistics. I then tried to search the web pages of a few library partners I looked at the University  I had a little luck on Stanford's web site on Robotic Book Scanning.  There was a page a few statistics listed there but alas they dated from June2004.

I even Googled such keywords that I hoped would bring up statistics. But considering how many different way one might refer to statistical information, it was frustrating to do.  I didn't find any statistics this way but I did find some intersting Blog entries about the full-text copyright issue.

So I was on my own.

The U.S. Department of State has just released the 2006 Annual Report on Human Rights.

The 2006 Annual Report on Human Rights Consists of the Following Sections:
+ Preface, Overview and Acknowledgements, and Introduction
+ Africa Country Reports
+ East Asia and the Pacific Country Reports
+ Europe and Eurasia Country Reports
+ Near East and North Africa Country Reports
+ South and Central Asia Country Reports
+ Western Hemisphere Country Reports
+ Appendices
+ Related Material

You can access archived versions of the Annual Report on Human Rights back to 1995 here.

Last week, DOS released the 2007 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.

Note the * to links to a PDF of a revised report. The website notes:

The 2007 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report has been revised since its original posting to the website.

No this isn't a new FGI poll :-) In today's NY Times, there's an op-ed article entitled, "Op-Art: Who Do You Think We Are?" by Ben Schott (author of “Schott’s Original Miscellany” and “Schott’s Almanac,” a yearbook of American society, both must-have books for any serious trivia junky!). The article talks about the General Social Survey, which has been exploring the American psyche for 34 years. After the US Census, the GSS is the most frequently analyzed data source in the social sciences. The GSS is administered by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

Don't forget to check out the multimedia component of the article to see some of the questions that have been asked over the years (link opens a new browser window).