Marketing Idea: Swine Flu Flashback
One of the things I think documents librarians can do to market their resources is to try and match current events to their collections. A case in point is the current outbreak of swine influenza. Did you know that there was an outbreak in the 1970s that threatened to explode into a pandemic? Emergency supplementals were made and vaccines were rushed out into the field -- possibly too early, according to some reports. Using a combination of WorldCat and the Catalog of Government Publications, I came up with this list of publications:
United States. (1976). Emergency supplemental appropriation bill, 1976: Hearing before a subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session ... swine influenza immunization program. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1976). Emergency supplemental appropriation bill, 1976 Swine influenza immunization program : hearings before a subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session, Subcommittee on the Departments of Labor and Health, Education, and Welfare. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1976). National swine flu immunization program of 1976: Report to accompany S. 3735. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1984). Patty Jean Tipton and her husband, Ronald Tipton: Report (to accompany S. 1488). Washington, D.C.?: U.S. G.P.O. United States. (1976). Preventive health services and employment programs emergency supplemental appropriations Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Swine Influenza Immunization Program, Department of Labor, Community Services Administration, Public Employment and Summer Youth Programs : hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session, on H.J. Res. 890. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1976). Proposed national swine flu vaccination program: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session ... March 31, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1976). Public Law 94-380: 94th Congress, S. 3735, August 12, 1976 : an act to amend the Public Health Service act to authorize the establishment and implementation of an emergency national swine flu immunization program and to provide an exclusive remedy for personal injury or death arising out of the manufacture, distribution, or administration of the swine flu vaccine under such program. Washington: For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1977). Review and evaluation of the swine flu immunization program Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, Ninety-fifth Congress, first session ... September 16, 1977. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1978). Review and evaluation of the swine flu immunization program: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, Ninety-fifth Congress, first session ... September 16, 1977. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1976). Supplemental appropriation for production of swine influenza vaccine: Communication from the President of the United States ... March 29, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1976). Supplemental appropriation for production of swine influenza vaccine: Message from the President of the United States ... March 29, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1977). Suspension of the swine flu immunization program, 1976: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Labor and Public Health Welfare, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session ... December 17, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1977). Suspension of the swine flu immunization program, 1976: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session ... December 17, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1976). Swine flu immunization program, 1976 Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session ... April 1 and August 5, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1976). Swine flu immunization program: Supplemental hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment...Ninety-fourth Congress, second session...June 28, July 20, 23, and September 13, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1976). Swine flu immunization program: Supplemental hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off. United States. (1977). The swine flu program: An unprecedented venture in preventive medicine, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare : report to the Congress. Washington: U.S. General Accounting Office]. United States. (1976). Swine flu vaccine. FDA consumer memo. Rockville, Md: U.S. Food and Drug Administration.For a hyperlinked version of this list, please see http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/dcornwall/lists/697063/. As far as I could tell, none of these items are currently available on the internet. So now we've not only highlighted stuff in depositories by creating and posting this list, we've made some basic metadata accessible to the web for researchers who may never visit a catalog or worldcat.org. Finally, I'd like to point out that this list was easily compiled because we have structured databases with controlled vocabulary and the ability to easily limit by date. Try searching "swine flu 1970s hearings" on Google and see if you get authoritative results. Cataloging matters! Continue reading
Guide of the Week: Public Policy Matrix
This week's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki will be useful in stimulating critical thinking about public policy:
Public Policy Matrix (Grace York, University of Michigan, 1999) CC Last updated 5/12/2008 - Noncommercial copying and adaptation of this guide is permitted if the original author is cited as stipulated under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 LicenseThis guide is structured differently than many of the librarian produced guides we have highlighted before. Instead of the usual list of resources with or without annotations, we have a guide that this broken down by types of questions:
WHAT'S THE PROBLEM? | WHAT'S THE SOLUTION? LEGISLATIVE SOLUTION Legislative Process | Influences on Legislators EXECUTIVE BRANCH SOLUTION Executive Branch Options | Influences on Executive Branch MONITORING THE RESULTFor each question or type of solution, subsets of the session are offered along with resources that might answer that question. For example, for "Who is influencing Congress?" We have:
- Journal and Newspaper articles
- Political Parties
- Committee Chairmen
- Colleagues
- Congressional Hearings for Lobby Group and Executive Branch Testimony
- Executive Branch
- Interest Groups
- Campaign Finances
- Public
Guide of the Week: Patent and Trademark Information
Patent research is one of more obscure things one can do. It is hard enough to determine whether there is a US patent for a given invention, and today's globalized world often requires looking at international patents as well. Where to begin? One place to start is this week's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki:
Patent and Trademark Information (Univ. of California--Berkeley, 1999) Last updated 2/9/2007This guide is divided into the following sections:
- Introduction
- Pre-1872 Patent Information
- Foreign and International Patent Information
- Other Patent Collections
- Bibliography of Patent & Trademark Sources
- CD-ROM Sources
- Internet Sources
- Step by Step Patent Research
- Japan Patent Office: A searchable database of Japanese patent abstracts, which includes the patent number, title, inventor, company, and abstract of the patent.
- Foreign patents: a guide to official patent literature by Francis J. Kase. 1972.
- Code of Federal Regulations, Title 37: Patents, Trademarks and Copyrights.
- Finding List for United States Patent, Design, Trademark, Reissue, Label, Print, and Plant Patent Numbers. - Gives the volume number of the Official Gazette in which a given patent number will be found for the years 1872-1993. Includes information on earlier patents.
- Google Patent Search - Access over 7 million patents from 1790-2006. Does not currently include patent applications, international patents, or U.S. patents issued over the last few months. Includes tips for advanced patent searching.
- Searching for pre-1976 U.S. patents via University of Maine
- Patent Search Tutorial and Information via University of Texas
- The 7-Step Strategy via the U.S. Patent Office
- U.S. Patent Searching via Oregon State University
DLC Discussion: Wrong Question & Right Answer
Kudos to GPO and DLC leadership for posing a series of discussion questions for Monday's meeting in Tampa. If you haven't seen the questions yet, I urge you to visit http://fdlp.gov/component/content/article/184-gpoprojects/376-new-birth-questions and ponder them whether or not you'll be in Tampa next week. While most of the questions are good ones, there is one question that just shouldn't be asked in 2009. It is from the questions about Regionals' management and it is:
5. For more than 15 years now, certain members of the library community and the Depository Library Council have discussed redundancy and the number of comprehensive collections of content needed to ensure permanent public access. Title 44 requires that regionals retain at least one copy of all Government publications either in printed or microfacsimile form (except those authorized to be discarded by the Superintendent of Documents). In order to consider future models that may be legally permissible as requested by the library community, should regional depository libraries be able to withdraw portions or all of their tangible collection if they have access to digital equivalents? What are the long-term implications for depository library collection responsibilities necessary to achieve the FDLP's primary goal of permanent public access to both print and digital materials?This could have been an excellent question except for (Emphasis mine): "should regional depository libraries be able to withdraw portions or all of their tangible collection if they have ACCESS to digital equivalents?" Access to third party servers are not a collection and never will be. Think if this was a question for an academic library: "Should academic libraries discard part of all of their printed journals if they have a subscription to a full text serials database?" Or even: "Should academic libraries discard part or all of their printed journals if these journals are currently available freely over the web?" Who wants to be holding the bag in five to seven years when the publisher goes out of business or charges more than you can afford? Will you be the one to explain the empty serials stacks to your faculty? Neither I nor my likeminded colleagues are against digital materials. But we insist on custody. The question that SHOULD be discussed in Tampa is: "In order to consider future models that may be legally permissible as requested by the library community, should regional depository libraries be able to withdraw portions or all of their tangible collection if they HOLD LOCAL COPIES of digital equivalents?" My answer to that question is an enthusiastic YES! For example, if a Regional is currently participating in the USDOCS LOCKSS PLN that is caching the content of GPO Access around the country, then they (subject to changes in Title 44) should be allowed to discard their tangible holdings that correspond to what has been stored in their LOCKSS boxes. That way even if Congress mandates fee-based access next year, that Regional will still have copies of their digital materials for patrons to access over the web. With apologies to Stanford, the local copy doesn't have to be based on the LOCKSS model, but it should be a server located at the Regional or its parent institution. The server should be capable of serving content over the internet. Continue reading
Guide of the Week: Los Angeles
The ALA GODORT Handout Exchange has librarian-produced guides using resources from every level of government, from international to local. Today's guide is a case in point:
Official Links for Los Angeles City and Los Angeles County (Mary Finley, California State University-Northridge, 2008)This guide is broken up into six sections:
- Official Links: City of Los Angeles - Los Angeles County
- Directories and Guides: Services & Help - Business Assistance - Transportation - Education & Culture
- L. A. City/County Statistics & Facts: Economic/Demographic - Crime - Environment - Education - Health - Other - Budgets
- Election Issues & Results
- Politicians: Who represents you? - Contact the politicians - Lobbyists and Campaign Contributions
- Local Codes and Regulations
- American FactFinder (Census Bureau)
- Airport Passenger Boarding and All-Cargo Data (Federal Aviation Administration) - Reports include data on several Los Angeles area airports.
- California Department of Finance - Site includes demographic as well as financial and economic data.
- Residential Vacancy Data (City of Los Angeles Housing Dept.)
- Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services Statistics - Statistical reports, caseload characteristics, and various research reports about social assistance programs and welfare reform from the Research, Evaluation and Quality Assurance Division of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services.
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