Last week we introduced the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki, a set of resource guides created by documents librarians for the larger community of government information users. Last week I forgot to mention that the committee that maintains the guides are actively seeking new additions as stated on their website:
The goal of this GODORT Education Committee project is to gather into one place the many tools available to government information librarians to assist in the successful management of electronic government information and in building advocacy skills to promote access to this information.
Please feel free to add your handouts, guides, and tutorials to the Exchange to assist your government information colleagues. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We can provide templates for one another to save time, share models, and work smarter.
With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, we come to this week’s highlight:
Government Documents on Agriculture (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 1999) Last modified 1/29/2008
Bert Chapman has produced a large number of guides to government information. And all of them are quite good. He generally starts his guide as he does here with an introductory paragraph that includes useful catalog subject headings:
The U.S. Government produces voluminous information on agriculture. This information covers material as diverse as gardening advice, crop insurance, rice production, soils of individual U.S. counties, wheat export statistics, and laws. Purdue Libraries have many government publications on agriculture with most of these being in the HSSE, LIFE, and MEL Libraries. Useful subject headings to search the Library Catalog for government information on agriculture include
Agriculture and State–United States
Agricultural Laws and Legislation–United States
Agricultural Price Supports–United States
Crop Insurance
Peanuts
Poultry Industry
Wheat Trade–United States
In addition to listing basic resources such as:
He also points out agencies likely to have agricultural related publications at various levels of government:
- House Agriculture Committee HSSE DOC Y 4.AG 8/1: (Reps. Mike Pence (R-IN), Joe Donnelly (D-IN) and Brad Ellsworth (R-IN) are members of this committee)
- National Agricultural Safety Database
- Indiana Agricultural Statistics Service
- International Coffee Organization
- South Africa Dept. of Agriculture
This guide highlights an important feature of librarian expertise — the ability to pull together information sources on a topic from multiple levels of government in a meaningful way. So if you’re interested in Agriculture from Indiana to Argentina, check out the rest of this guide. Then see what else is available.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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