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Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

Guide of the Week: Love at First Sight

After a 13 week stint of covering how librarian-produced information guides could help inform President Obama, the Congress and the general public on the General Accountability Office’s 13 Urgent Transition issues, we return to our regular format of one guide per week.

In honor of Valentine’s day, we highlight the one handout in the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange with the word “Love” in the the title:

Documents Librarianship: Love at First Sight, Powerpoint file (Grace York, University of Michigan, 2002) Creative Commons License – may be reused or altered with attribution to creator.

This 2002 powerpoint presentation is an introduction to documents librarianship for non-specialists. I think it does a great job of highlighting the great breadth of government information in people’s lives. Grace shows how government documents eventually touch anyone you can think of – workers, family members, students, business owners and so on.

The slides also document challenges and trends in documents librarianship and in particular the challenges and opportunities facing Federal Depository Libraries (FDLs). While the FDL stats Grace used are dated, they could quickly be brought up to date for a presentation on government documents.

Despite being seven years old, this powerpoint still stands as a handy intro to the world of US government information. Check it out. Then, if you’re a documents librarian, bring it up to date, give Grace York proper credit for the original and link the resulting product back to the Handout Exchange.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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