And now the moment you've all been waiting for when we unveil our special guest blogger this month. So please welcome to the podium Ric Davis, acting Superintendent of Documents and Director of Library Services & Content Management at the U.S. Government Printing Office(read more of Ric's bio here). We're really excited to have Ric blogging for us and look forward to the conversations this month. Take it away Ric!

Ric Davis currently serves as the Acting Superintendent of Documents while continuing to serve as Director of Library Services and Content Management at the U.S. Government Printing Office. Davis coordinates and administers a variety of GPO initiatives, including the Federal Depository Library Program, the Cataloging and Indexing Program, the International Exchange Service and the ByLaw Program. Additionally, he manages GPO Access, GPO's Web site that is a leading source of free and official Government information.

We've got a special treat in store for the month of August with a very special blogger of the month. I'm not going to tell yet, but suffice it to say, it's gonna be BIG! So stay tuned :-)

Hi all. We're taking a little guest blogger holiday for the month of July. FGI volunteers will continue to post to the center column. We have a *really* special guest lined up for August, so stay tuned for that! HUGE thanks to the Stanford Law Librarians, who graciously took 2 rounds of BOTM! And as always, if you're interested in being a guest blogger, please email us at admin AT freegovinfo DOT info.

You may also have noticed that we've got a new look. We just thought it was time for a little spruced-up look and feel, sort of like a new shirt :-) We're still the same old FGI underneath. Let us know what you think by leaving us a comment.

Happy May Day (whether you observe International Workers' Day or the lesser known Loyalty Day)!!

This month we have a special treat for you: a group of law librarians from Stanford have agreed to be group bloggers-of-the-month for May, 2008. The group includes Paul Lomio, Brian Provenzale, Erika Wayne, Kate Wilko, and George Wilson -- see the Stanford Law Librarians' bios for more on what they do and where their interests lie. We're really looking forward to reading what's on the minds of these good folks.

Thanks also to Frank Lester, our BOTM for April, 2008! Below is the recap of the threads that Frank got started.

• Court Invalidates Part of Copyright Remedy Clarification Act
• HHS Appeals Ruling That Would Give Consumers More Access to Physician Medicare Claims Database
• Consumer Satisfaction with E-Government on the Downturn

Remember, if you're interested in taking a turn at the BOTM podium, please email us at admin AT freegovinfo DOT info.

Take it away Stanford Law Librarians!!

J. Paul Lomio is library director and lecturer at law at Stanford Law School. Paul hates paying for government information twice -- once as a taxpayer, and then again as a library director forced to purchase government produced information. Paul has graduate degrees in law from Gonzaga Law School and the University of Washington and a masters of library and information science from the Catholic University of America. Paul was admitted to the Washington State Bar. He is the author (with Henrik Spang-Hanssen) of Legal Research Methods in the U.S. and Europe (DJOF 2008).

Brian Provenzale has been a librarian for a few years (at UCLA and currently at Stanford) and a Web nerd for over ten. He thinks every U.S. citizen should, with minimal effort, be able to find out what the government is doing at all times.

Sergio Stone. Sergio is Stanford's first Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian.

Erika V. Wayne is deputy library director and lecturer in law at Stanford Law School. Along with George Wilson, Kate Wilko and Paul Lomio, Erika Wayne has co-taught Advanced Legal Research for 3 years. Erika's interest in Open Access dates back to the 1996 when she helped in the development of the Securities Class Action Clearinghouse -- the first court designated internet site for public posting of securities litigation filings. And, she hates to pay for *anything* that should be free. She has a JD from Penn, an AB from Duke and a MS from Illinois in Library and Information Science.

Kate Wilko is a Reference Librarian and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School. This Spring marks the sixth time she has team-taught Advanced Legal Research. Within the legal research world and its limited publisher options, open access is quickly becoming a topic of more urgent importance. Kate is very pleased to be able to share thoughts and ideas with other open access community members on freegovinfo.info

George Wilson is a reference librarian at Stanford's law library. He started working there in late 2005, after having spent seven years in corporate law practice in Washington, DC and San Francisco, as well as around a decade as a researcher and administrator in various Stanford departments. He has a JD from Georgetown, a BA from UC Berkeley, and will receive his MLIS degree from San Jose State in May 2008.

On the blogger-of-the-month (BOTM) tap this month for your viewing/reading pleasure will be Frank Lester. Frank works at UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies Library -- read more about Frank on his FGI bio page.

Boy, have we been on a run with our BOTM's or what? Huge thanks to Rebecca Blakeley, our BOTM for March, 2008. Rebecca posted a ton of interesting stories, commented on hers and others' posts and constantly beat me to the punch on tracking key stories. Below are just some of her posts over the month. Thanks again Rebecca. We hope you continue to feed us interesting stories in the future!

Frank Lester is Electronic Services Librarian at the Institute of Governmental Studies Library at the University of California at Berkeley, a collection specializing in non-trade materials, ephemera, serials, and mongraphs relating to California and federal politics, public policy, and public administration. He is also the Institute of Governmental Studies webmaster and is on a rotating 2-year assignment as the webmaster of the Librarians Association of the University of California (LAUC), ending in the fall of 2008.

Previous to IGS, he was an assistant government documents librarian at the University of Michigan, staff assistant at the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan, and a reference administrator at the Internet Public Library. Prior to his career as a librarian, Lester was a member of the campaign finance staff at the San Francisco Ethics Commission for three years. Lester has published in the Journal of Electronic Publishing and is the main contributor to the California Policy Inbox, a regularly updated blog highlighting recently-published California government agency and non-profit organization public policy documents and current California public policy news developments. Lester's main interests are national, state, and local politics, the role of developing technologies in increasing public access to and interest in government documents, and the intersection between the digital and the traditional library realms.

Welcome to the podium Rebecca Blakeley, head of the Government Documents Department at the McNeese State University Library. Take it away Rebecca!

And many thanks to our BOTM for February, Susanna Leers. Susanna was one of our most prolific bloggers with 40(!) posts for the short leep month! To see all of Susanna's stories, go to her blog. Below are Susanna's latest 10 posts (which I generated from her RSS feed with the handy rss2js feed converter). 3 Cheers for Susanna!!

Rebecca Blakeley is head of the Government Documents Department at the McNeese State University Library in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She was recently selected to be a 2008 American Library Association Emerging Leader.

Prior to McNeese, Rebecca worked in the Reference and Government Publications departments at the University of Rhode Island and also taught courses on Information Literacy. She received her M.L.I.S. in 2005 and her B.A. in Anthropology in 2003, both from the University of Rhode Island. Rebecca fell in love with
Government Documents when she took an online course with Daniel O'Mahony, whose passion for "Documents to the People" inspired her to become a documents librarian. Rebecca is a techie wannabee and is neither Gen X nor Gen Y but somewhere in between. Feel free to visit her department's blog, Gov Docs on the Bayou.

Next up on the BOTM podium for the month of February is Susanna Leers. Susanna is the E-research & Technology Services Librarian at Barco Law Library, University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Take it away Susanna.

Many thanks also to John Shuler, especially for starting the conversation about government documents instruction. If you haven't had a chance, please read that thread and weigh in on the conversation. Here are the threads of John's month as BOTM:

• Global Village or Global slums?
• What to teach to future government information librarians: Escape from the Blackboard Jungle
• Back to the future: Jefferson's 1815 Library records and Preservation of 21st Century State Digital Information

Susanna Leers says...

I'm the E-research & Technology Services Librarian at Barco Law Library, University of Pittsburgh School of Law. I've been working here for 5 years. I got my BA at Columbia University in New York, and my MLIS and MSL (Master of Studies in Law) at the University of Pittsburgh.

In my position as an academic law librarian I serve both law school patrons and public patrons who are permitted to use our library for legal research and for access to our Government Documents collection. I also purchase and manage all our law database subscriptions - whose use is usually restricted, per our license agreements, to law school faculty and students. So I am keenly aware of the government information that is freely available and the government information that is not. I would like our public patrons to be able to easily access the same government information that we can pull up so easily in licensed databases. Because, as you say so eloquently in the blog, "While governments will continue to fulfill their role of creating and disseminating information, there is another continuing essential role for preserving and organizing that information for users and providing long-term access to and service for that information."

Greetings and welcome to 2008. FGI has been a little quiet over the holidays, but we're rested and ready to go for 2008. With that in mind, our blogger-of-the-month for January is John Shuler, from the University of Illinois Chicago (see John's bio for more background). Please check back early and often as there's bound to be lots of interesting posts from John as well as the FGI volunteers. The podium is yours, John. Take it away!

John Shuler is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a Bibliographer for Government Information and Urban Planning/Documents Librarian Collections Development. Previously he was head of the documents department at Colgate University. Shuler has published extensively on information in electronic media and is a strong advocate of virtual reference. He worked with GPO to create our first ever formal digital partnership between the U.S. State Department the FDLP, and spearheaded library virtual reference collaboration and is working with the Government Printing Office to implement the reference project as a full partnership. Shuler is also an adjunct faculty member in the Graduate Library and Information program of Dominican University. He serves on the Public Printer's Depository Library Council, on the editorial board of Journal of Academic Librarianship, and is an assistant editor for Government Information Quarterly. He is primarily interested in blogging about the impact of digital government information and local/state governments.

Please welcome to the BOTM podium Carlos Diaz, our blogger of the month for November, 2007. Carlos provides a convenient psychic bookend to Barrett Jones -- our Oct BOTM -- in that he hails from the other Washington, Washington State. Welcome Carlos! We'd like to thank Barrett Jones, our BOTM for October. I wish we could offer him a salary to continue working for FGI as you no doubt saw the bad news about his leaving IMF. Any grant writers out there want to write one to push FGI into the 501(c)3 arena?! Please be sure to look back through Barrett's posts last month. There was quite a bit of interest, not least of which was the thread about the World Library -- which has become our most emailed post!! Here's our version of a Feschrift for Barrett:

• Read Your Own DHS Travel Dossier
• Conversations, Not Memos
• Do We Need A World Library?
• Mind the Gap with Gapminder
• iSimulate - collaborative economic modeling
• Mapping Human Rights
• The IMF Starts Blogging