Daniel at Reference Renaissance
A week from today, I (Daniel) will be attending the Reference Renaissance conference in Denver. If you're attending, let's talk. If there's enough of us, maybe we can do a meal or something. I'm attending for my library and I'm mostly looking for ways to better serve our large number of remote users. But I'm sure there'll be something that can be put to documents use. Assuming there is, I'll do my best to blog about it here. Continue reading
Guide of the Week: International Trade
Do you know your SIC from your SITC? Do you know where to find foreign trade statistics? How about where to look up an unfamiliar term from international trade? Let this week's ALA GODORT Handout Exchange guide help you: International Trade (Ed Herman, University of Buffalo, 2007) CC This guide is part annotated bibliography and part explanation of different trade classification schemes. It is broken down into the following areas:
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Background Information for Foreign Trade
Trade Classifications
Trade Statistics-United States
Trade Statistics-States
Trade Statistics-Other Countries
Background Data About Foreign Countries
Trade Barriers
Trade Treaties, Laws, and Regulations
Key Government Agencies Supporting Foreign Trade
Campaign Finance: AK, AL, CO, DC, HI, IL, MO, NV, OH
As part of the fruit of the ALA GODORT State and Local Documents Task Force's State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project, I used the project blog to create a listing of state-level campaign finance databases. So far I've got nine states: Alaska, Alabama, Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada and Ohio. Do you know of other state campaign finance databases? Either leave a comment below of drop me a line at dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net. And if you use any of the databases listed above, I'd really love to see your comments on the project blog entry for that database. Continue reading
Guide of the Week: Federal Budget Process
There are few things more complicated than the US federal budget process. This week's guide: U.S. Government Documents: The Budget Process (Jerry Breeze, Columbia University, 1999) Last Updated sometime in 2008 Can help you untangle the fiscal knots that is the United States Budget. This selective guide points to information about the current budget, including state by state budget impacts as well as historical data and background materials. This guide also has a federal budget calendar which can help you see when different budget publications becomes available. Finally, Jerry provides a section on News and Commentary which draws from non-governmental sources. The next time you are faced with a concerned citizen or a student writing about an aspect of the US budget, point them to this guide. Then see what else is available from the Handout Exchange. Don't see the subject you're looking for? If you're a documents librarian why not research the subject yourself, put a guide together and link that to the Exchange? Or build a guide on the Exchange wiki itself? Continue reading
Cataloging Didn’t Get Results in Alaska
Update: September 4, 2008 It breaks my heart and embarrasses me to do this, but I've discovered that the circulation figures I used for the post below were flawed. Specifically, the reports I consulted treated internal processing as a checkout. Once we recalculated our circ stats to only include transactions involving real patrons and ILL transactions, we found that our document circulation has been relatively low and flat for the last five years. No visible bump from cataloging the collection. Is this the end of the story? I doubt it. First, we only completed the retro project this year, so a number of documents haven't been available in the catalog for too long. Second, staff are now in a better place to identify and promote federal documents then we were last year. This may make higher circulation possible. But I don't know. I'll get back to you. - Daniel ======Original Post========== At the Alaska State Library, we recently completed a barcoding project which finally let us put all of our manual shelflist items into our catalog for our patrons to find. This also meant that our holdings went onto Open WorldCat for others to find. I'm happy to report that we've had a 7% increase in checkouts of federal documents compared to the previous fiscal year. I'm sure the cataloging project was responsible because the rate of increase for documents checkouts outperformed other parts of the collection. Since the project was only completed in the fiscal year that ended on June 30th, I expect to see more growth in documents checkouts in the coming year. There are many ways to make open a tangible collection to the world. Good cataloging is a start! Continue reading
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