Yes it's census season again. And to mark the coming of the 2010 census, The US Census Bureau has digitalized all the decennial censuses in pdf from 1790 through 2000. Check out how your city/town/state/district has changed over the 210 years of the census. Census geeks might also want to check out this handy guide to the census called Measuring America: The Decennial Censuses From 1790 to 2000 where one can read the actual questionnaires for each census and get background history on each census. Oh and don't forget American Factfinder, the Census's database for the 1990 and 2000 census, American Community Survey, Economic Census, and annual economic surveys. Factfinder includes quick facts, mapping tools and more.

Happy data hunting!

I just talked with a researcher who was interested in getting his hands on a digital copy of the 1957 Census of Governments. My momentary joy at finding a copy at the University of Michigan (my go-to library to find digital govt documents!) quickly turned to disappointment on seeing the message:

Page images and full text of this item are not available due to copyright restrictions.

There ought to be a way for people/librarians to check the document for copyrighted bits and then quickly flip a switch to release it into the public domain and make it accessible to everyone. Is that too much to ask? Over time, we could lessen the impact that Google's scorched earth copyright policy has on documents that should rightfully be in the public domain. And another thing, why didn't they scan statistical resources to .csv files?!

That is all.

I had to explain to a student patron and their Professor today what is meant by "born digital" and how digital government documents are wonderful resources for a paper if we do not have the print version or when the print version doesn't exist (or is horribly out of date). Have any of you had to explain this a lot?

It all started when the student patron told me she could only have three web sources for her Nursing research paper after I had shown her the wonderful world of digital documents online. She had found an eleven year old version of a government print source in our catalog but I cringed...born digital documents online via NIH or the U.S. Dept. of Health had more up to date medical information on her topic! I told her to use both the print and online sources. She would be able to see if there were any noticeable differences from the 1997 print version and the 2007/2008 online information on her topic.

I contacted the Professor and explained this too. All is well and she will allow for the use of online government information. She was just hoping to avoid the use of too many general (i.e. crappy) websites. I understand that but I wanted to make sure that the student would not be punished for using several good government online documents and websites for her paper.

I didn't get into the nitty gritty digital authentication of government documents, but with some Professors who require legislative research, I tell them about the digitally authenticated documents that currently exist from GPO.

I have a feeling we government document librarians are going to have to explain this concept of "born digital" gov docs and digital authentication more often...especially now that more and more gov docs are being born digitally.

I've been reading and digesting the recently released Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative website and the sustainable formats page, so I can discuss it (if there is time) during my presentation at next week's Depository Library Conference.

A dozen federal agencies launched an initiative to establish a common set of guidelines for digitizing historical materials. Two working groups have been established: the Still Image (books, photographs, maps, etc.) and the Audio-Visual Working Group. They have two draft documents currently up for review and comment: Tiff Image Metadata and Digital Imaging Framework. Comments are due on November 15.

I'm also loving their glossary of terms, which "has been generated to serve the participating agencies as a standardized vocabulary for their deliberations and guidelines" and it is "a work in progress" so suggestions are welcome.

Digitized Government Documents in Google Books has been written about quite a lot over here at the FGI and I'd like to revisit this topic again but with a different focus.

Trial of the Conspirators, for the Assassination of President Lincoln

Illustrations of the Gross Morbid Anatomy of the Brain in the Insane (isn't that a Cypress Hill song? Nevermind...) by the Government Hospital for the Insane.

How it Feels to be the Husband of a Suffragette (not published by the Government Printing Office, but it is a book housed in the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection in the Library of Congress).

Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion

Most of these documents were scanned at large research universities or depositories, but the quality is not always decent andcan sometimes border on the illegible. I was quite amused when I discovered a staff person's hand digitized on this document's cover:

However, there are bigger snafus than a digitized librarian's hand. For example, despite government documents being in the public domain, Google Books treats most post-1922 (i.e. post-copyright law) government documents as copyrighted material by only allowing a limited view! For more details, please read James Jacobs' post on this issue.

Despite all these issues (which have yet to be resolved), I decided to take advantage of the access to full-text, pre-1922 government documents and create a McNeese Gov Docs "Library"account in Google Books for my depository. The account also allows you to subscribe to updates of its holdings via an RSS feed. I put a link to the library account and the RSS feed on my depository's homepage and our "Gov Guides" wiki. I'll add more of these interesting and old documents as I come across them, especially those pertaining to Louisiana or documents that were lost to Hurricane Rita.

Here are some tips for finding gov docs in Google Books: Use Advanced Search, and in the Publisher field, type in Govt OR GPO OR "Government Printing Office". You can also search by agency, (i.e. "Department of the Interior") by typing the name of the agency in the Author field.

Have fun exploring and building your own digital collections, but please let me know if you find some really cool gov docs, ok?

Julia Tryon, Government Documents Librarian of the Phillips Memorial Library at Providence College posted some interesting information about the intersection of Federal Publications and Google Books to govdoc-l this week. She is quoted here with permisssion:

My director has asked me to discover what I may about the amount of documents available in Google's digital projects.  I've been looking at Google, partners' websites, articles, blogs, etc.  I have found a lot of chit-chat but very little substantive information.  Maybe I am just not looking for it the right way or in the right places.

It seems that there is a blackout on reporting statistics for these projects.  Google and most of the partners give no statistical data at all.  Stanford did have a page with statistics that was buried on their project's website but the information had not been updated since 2004.  

To figure out the statistics on my own, I have tried searching Google Books, Stanford, and University of Michigan; but there is no way to limit a search to government documents.  On Google I was able to search by publisher and, using various abbreviations for GPO that are used in
the publisher field, I came up with 187,522 (GPO-141,600; Gov't-2322; Government Printing Office-43,600).  The university catalogs did not allow me to search by publisher.

When looking at the search results in Google for publisher field has GPO, I found 141,600 items, only 82,487 of which were available in the full view.  And although it is nice to think that we have the full text for 82,487 documents, not all of them can be used.  I randomly picked a title to see how it looked and chose the Statistical Abstract for 1954. The pages were clear enough to read easily but on every even numbered page part of the right hand column was chopped off.

Have you done your own study/poking around/etc with Google Books and Federal Documents? Share your findings with us!