Guide of the Week: Agriculture
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 StatesIn 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
New Feature: Guide of the Week
Government Information librarians have acquired a lot of expertise. We've written a lot of guides and pathfinders to government information. The Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) of ALA has been collecting these handouts for years so we docs librarians wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel every time we needed to create a handout or give someone a starting point for research. Recently, this GODORT "Handout Exchange" has been wikified at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Exchange. The Handout Exchange is divided into four areas:
- Guides & Handouts for Depository Management
- Subject-oriented Guides and Tutorials
- Source- and Geography-oriented Guides and Tutorials
- Product-oriented Guides and Tutorials
- Books like The Port Chicago Mutiny. Warner, NY, 1989.
- Journal articles like "Report on the Negro Soldier". Infantry Journal, #59, Dec., 1946 (UD1 .I43)
- Electronic resources like Desegregation of the Armed Services at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/9981.htm.
Honk if you love e-Government
One of the presentations I was able to attend at ALA was Libraries & Government: Issues, Services and Strategies. Notes and handouts to this session should eventually be available on ALA's 2008 Conference materials site at http://presentations.ala.org/index.php?title=Monday%2C_June_30#Monday_10:30am_Start_Time. The presenters were John Carlo Bertot, Mary Alice Baish, Suzanne Sears and Pat Ball. The presentation was a good mix of policy level and library level ideas on egovernment as it affects libraries. All libraries, not just Federal Depository Libraries. John Bertot introduced the session and suggested people look at his college's E-Government for Public Librarians site at http://www.libraryegov.org/. Suzanne Sears' part included tips on how to assist people looking to use egovernment services while respect most libraries time limits on Internet computers. The tip that most stood out to me was to have worksheets (like the ones for student aid FAFSA forms) available in the library. Encourage patrons to complete the worksheet prior to getting on the computer. This seems like it would decrease frustration for everyone. Mary Alice Baish provided an overview of the E-Government Services Act of 2002 and of efforts to renew this expiring Act. Among other things, this is the Act that brought us usa.gov. If the Act ultimately expires, a lot of things could go away, including usa.gov. That would be bad. There is a good chance that the Act will be renewed, since a recent OMB report said that while e-government initiatives cost agencies $121 million/year, the federal government is collecting $340 million in fees from egovernment sites. So it's a great deal for the government, if not for taxpayers. That's why Mary Alice's organization, the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) is working with ALA and other stakeholders for improvements in the legislation. She asked librarians to help in the reauthorization movement and offered several suggestions including:
- Contact your Senator, especially if they serve on the Senate Homeland Security Committee and tell them you support S. 2321
- Assess government web sites and services and publish your findings.
Isn’t it great to be in the depository?
I saw the LITA's President's program at ALA on Sunday, June 29, 2008. The program was called "Isn't it great to be in the library? Wherever that is." The presenters were Joe Janes and the bloggers from OCLC's It's all good blog. While it was aimed at libraries in general, I think it has special relevance for document depositories of all levels of government. Joe Janes answered the question, "What does it mean to be in a library?" as follows, "Anywhere, anytime, any way, which people interact with information organized and/or provided that is supported by their own community via their library staff." Notice that this is a definition that takes in physical as well as virtual transactions. Janes suggested that a library in the 21st Century is both somewhere and everywhere. In terms of how to serve our patrons, Janes asserted, "We must be available, positioned, and ready to support our patrons, to assist and participate with them -- on their terms." This seems like good advice for depositories, whether federal, state, or international. We need to remain physical places to accommodate the 80 million plus Americans who are not online and may not be joining the net anytime soon. But we also need to be available for the hundreds of millions of Americans who ARE online. Our libraries, our resources and our expertise must be easily discoverable on the web for our local and remote users. How can we do this?
- Like James Jacobs has suggested, we can blog our answers to interesting reference questions. Especially if the answers are not findable on the public internet.
- If you are a Federal Depository Library coordinator, stop reading this post right now and e-mail John Shuler about how your library can participate in Government Information Online, the nationwide govdoc chat reference service that now has about two dozen partners, including my library. It's easy to participate and will only get easier as more libraries join. The service is already been used. I've personally helped people locate documents on the 1960s New Left, found HUD info specific to Native Americans and point veterans towards educational benefits.
- Join Rebecca Blakeley and the Washington State Library in establishing LibraryThing accounts.
- Join the Alaska State Library in establishing Open WorldCat lists that come with RSS feeds.
- Join the growing number of libraries offering RSS feeds for new fed docs.
- Survey your users and see where they like to find information online. Then try to be in at least one of those places.
Changing Title 44: Please Not Yet
I've been following the discussion on the GPO regionals report and especially the back and forth on whether to push for revising Title 44. I posted a response to the godort list that I'd like to share here: I really didn't want to write about the Regionals Report until I had a chance to actually read through the 100 plus pages. But with the recent GODORT discussion about changing Title 44, I feel like I need to chip in on this one issue. I am in total agreement with Stephen Hayes, who said, "DO NOT GO THERE. DON'T OPEN THAT PANDORA'S BOX. DO NOT TRY AND REVISE TITLE 44 UNLESS YOU WANT TO LOSE WHAT WE ALREADY HAVE." This is not the time to press for changes to Title 44. I say this as someone who feels that Title 44 could use some major changes -- starting off with eliminating the Sales program and creating a permanent endowment fund for GPO operations, especially cataloging, documents distribution and building on FDSys to create geographically dispersed, local electronic collections. But I think we have a lot of educational work ahead of us AND a political culture to change. Both parties in Congress have shown themselves (as a group) to be: - Largely ignorant about technological/internet issues. - Lukewarm to hostile about Net Neutrality. - If we don't have Net Neutrality, any all e-docs program will die an inglorious death. - Sympathetic to privatization of government information products. - Too eager to support copyright absolutists by passing perpetual copyright on the installment plan. - Believe that libraries are on their way out because "Everything is on the Internet" - Unwilling to free their own stuff (CRS reports, etc) While there are individual Members of Congress who don't fit the stereotypes above, I think the above statements are a pretty fair characterization of Congress as a whole, no matter which party has power. In this climate, I think that reopening Title 44 will likely lead to more privatization, more wholesale going digital regardless of supporting infrastructure and possible cost-recovery mandates. One thing I think it is important to do is for GODORT and individual depository libraries to ramp up education and outreach to Congress and the general public. We need to get awareness of the uniqueness of our collections, free government databases and librarian expertise into the thinking of policymakers and constitutents alike. We should try running with GPO's "Easy as FDL" campaign for awhile. Then when we've helped people to understand that society benefits from free, unrestricted (mostly) access to information and from having experts in using that information, then it may be time to teach them about how much better it could be if we could have some changes to Title 44. Trying to make changes to Title 44 before we've established our importance in the public mind and in the minds of policymakers seems like a mistake to me. Changes will be made that will benefit the interests of people who have established themselves as important parts of society. Just my $0.02. Now I'll do my best to actually read the regionals report. It's so sad that we can't all be fully informed about everything, even within our own field. Continue reading
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