Help USGS Find the Missing!
While searching at the USGS Publications Warehouse, I noticed one of the available tabs was MIA. Clicking on this tab brought me to the MIA Publication page, where USGS asked the public's help in tracking down missing publications. Here's their explanation:
Listed below are all the USGS series that are currently or will soon be loaded into the Publication Warehouse. Each series may have missing report numbers or unverifiable citations. Missing report numbers are gaps in the numbering sequence of a series. We do not know if the report was ever released or if there is a reason why the report number was skipped. These reports may have been cancelled, recalled, or destroyed. Report numbers may have been issued in blocks and some may never have been used. Unverified citations Unverified citations are citations for any publication where there was some information about the publication available but that information could not be confirmed, the publication itself has not been found, and we are not sure if the publication was actually released. Many of the unverified reports were found referenced by other publications as "in press".Please visit the site for a list of the missing and help out if you can. You'll be responsible for putting more government information on the web. Continue reading
Guide of the Week: Anthropology
This week's "Guide of the Week" from the GODORT Handout Exchange is: Government Documents for Anthropologists (Word file) (Jennie Burroughs, University of Montana, 2008) CC Like a number of guides in the Handout Exchange, this guide was created for a college course. Because people, including government scholars, have been writing about anthropology for a long time, it has a mix of print and electronic sources including: -------------- Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology Call number: SI 1.33: A monographic series published irregularly. American Memory Collection URL: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ The Library of Congress is building an extensive digital library collection. The American Memory collection includes a wide variety of materials: photographs, correspondence, manuscripts, sound recordings, motion pictures, etc. Folklife materials are included in this digital collection. NARA 1930 Census http://1930census.archives.gov/ The 1930 Census is the most recent Census to become available to the public. NARA has an online database that can help you to identify the microfilm roll you need. Then, take that roll number to the microfilm drawers (call number: 312.0973 U58p 1930) to find the relevant reel. General Land Office Records & Maps - The Bureau of Land Management has created a Federal Land Patents Database that allows you to search for General Land Office grants issued between 1820 and 1908. You can perform a basic search, where you can search by state and patentee name, or a standard search, where you can search by patentee name, by a particular location (described by county, section, township, range, etc.), or by date and land office. http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/ ------------- The CC next to the guide name above means that this particular guide is available for noncommercial copying and adaptation if the original author is cited as stipulated under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. So as long as you provide credit to Jennie Burroughs, you could change her library's call numbers to your own, and print out as many handouts for your students as you like. The above resources are just a highlight of what's available in the guide. See it for yourself, then check out what else is available. And if you're a docs librarian with a handout of your own, link it to the wiki! Continue reading
Reference Renaissance: Session Writeups
For those who are interested in what I learned at Reference Renaissance, please visit http://alaskanlibrarian.wordpress.com/category/rr2008/, where you can find all of my session writeups. I didn't cross post here because I think most of what I picked up was out of scope for FGI. But a few themes from the conference that I think worth mentioning here are:
- Librarians must support patrons as content creators in addition to supporting them as content users.
- Reference (including document reference) needs to move from supplying stacks of documents to providing more targeted information, along with providing context.
- Librarians must continue to find non-traditional venues to be where information users are.
Guide of the Week: Consumer Issues
While we are a nation of citizens, we are also a nation of consumers. Every patron we have is a consumer and so all of them may have need for our current "Guide of the Week" from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange: Consumer Issues and Advocacy (Mary Finley, California State University-Northridge (CSUN), 2004) Last updated 1/10/2008 Mary Finley has put together an information guide broken down into sections on Books / Complaint Guides & Consumer Agencies / Business Addresses / Brandnames / Journal Articles / Newspapers / Government Agencies & Activities / Laws and Regulations / Internet. Many of the print resources listed in this guide can be found close to you either by searching the catalog of your local library or by searching on WorldCat.org. Ms. Finley's guide references online databases that CSUN has paid for the use of their students and faculty. Some of the same databases might be available to you. Check out the Indiana State Library's listing of statewide virtual libraries at http://www.in.gov/library/inspire/other_states.html to see what desktop database access you might have. Check out the guide. Then see what else is available. And if you're a docs librarian with a handout, please share it! Continue reading
Kris Tells Us Why We Should Care
In the Summer 2008 issue of Dttp: Documents to the People, Kris Kasianovitz has a thoughtful overview of copyright of state and local documents and how that interacts with efforts to digitize such documents. The article: Why Care About Copyright? by Chris Kasianovitz. Dttp, v.36, no. 2, Summer 2008, p. 12 Gives a history of state/local copyright and argues that for history's sake and on the principle of free access to government information, copyright law ought to be amended to give state and local gov't documents the same public domain status as federal documents. We at FGI are in hearty agreement with that! As far as I can tell, Kris' article is not freely available on line, but some of the history she covers is also available on our government copyright page at http://freegovinfo.info/copyright. The whole Summer 2008 Dttp is well worth the read. There is also a freely available web supplement that you should check out at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/DttP_Supplements_v36_n2 if for no other reason than that FGI's own James Jacobs has an article on using del.icio.us for government documents. Continue reading
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