Author Archives: dcornwall

This week featured continued activity at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. WELCOME PAM! Pam Crawford officially adopted the Kansas page this week and immediately got to work on a number of updates. ORPHANS - THEN THERE WERE THREE The adoption of Kansas leaves us with just three states waiting for volunteer government information specialists/enthusiasts to adopt them:

• Hawaii
• Minnesota
• Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting. DATABASE ACTIVITY For a complete picture of activity on our project this week, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are some highlights: DATABASES ADDED FLORIDA (Wilhelmina Randtke) CHARTS Community Health Assessment Resource Tool Set - Includes such health statistics as births, deaths, disease morbidity, behavioral risk factors, communicable diseases, chronic diseases, maternal & child health, environmental health, injury & violence, social & mental health, and population characteristics. KANSAS (Pam Crawford) Addiction Treatment Centers - Searchable by zip code, county, or city. MARYLAND (Siu Min Yu) Maryland Funding Accountability & Transparency - Search by agency making a payment, by vendor receiving a payment or by zip code of a vendor receiving payment. From the website, "This is a public web site which allows citizens of Maryland and visitors to search and view summary information on payments made to vendors that received $25,000 or more for the respective fiscal year. Information is currently available beginning Fiscal Year 2008." Continue reading →

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This was a mostly quiet week at the State Agency Databases Project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. Quiet enough that I would not normally put out an activity report, but there are two notable things I wanted to share with you. ORPHANS - THE FINAL FOUR? The adoption of Florida is pending. That leaves us with just four states waiting for volunteer government information specialists/enthusiasts to adopt them:

• Hawaii
• Kansas
• Minnesota
• Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting. CALIFORNIA'S DATABASE FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS As most government information specialists are aware, local government documents are probably the most elusive of all. California has taken a step to try to make their local government documents easier to find and use. I (and any other user of the State Agency Databases wiki) was made aware of this by Joel Rane, the volunteer for California. Here is his annotation of California's new resource:

California Local Government Documents - An extensive database of local government documents across the state; if a document is not online, a scanned copy is hosted by the Berkeley IGS. Includes access to local municipal codes and charters, searchable by city; documents related to land use and development issues, searchable by jurisdiction, type of planning document and year (at both county and city level); and budgets and financial reports for Bay Area cities, county budgets and annual financial reports, and annual reports from county grand juries, all searchable by keyword. A tremendous resource.

Hats off to UC Berkeley for putting this together and thanks to Joel Rane for making the rest of us aware of this new resource for one state's local documents. Continue reading →

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This week at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases: NEW VOLUNTEERS AND A STATE HAND-OFF This week we officially welcome three new volunteers to our project:

• Susan Paterson (University of British Columbia) - District of Columbia
• Siu Min Yu (Rice University) - Maryland
• Flora Shrode (Utah State University) - Utah

Flora is taking over the management of the Utah page from Susanne Caro who recently took over the Montana page. Susanne had been one of two volunteers with two state pages. I (Daniel Cornwall) am the other. In addition to my home state of Alaska, I also do my best to maintain the Arizona page. If you live in Arizona and would like to take over the page, let me know. ORPHANS: THE FINAL FIVE With the successful adoption of Maryland and the District of Columbia, we now have five states up for adoption:

• Florida
• Hawaii
• Kansas
• Minnesota
• Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting. DATABASE ACTIVITY For a full listing of activity over the past week, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are some highlights: DATABASES ADDED OHIO (Audrey Hall) Empowerment through Education county highlights] Summary of program activities for each county. Additional keyword searching available. NEW RESOURCES ON THE "NOT DATABASES" PAGE The following non-database resources were added to the South Dakota section of our "not databases" page:

• Adoption Resources in South Dakota
• South Dakota Resource Directory for the Elderly

A LOOK AT THE VOLUNTEERS BEHIND THE STATE AGENCY DATABASES PROJECT We recently surveyed our project volunteers about who they were, where they worked and where they updated their pages from. About 70% of our volunteers responded to the survey. Here are the demographic findings: What best describes your current job position? Librarian - 77.8% Paraprofessional - 8.3% Library Student - 2.8% Other (please specify) - 11.1% Responses from the "other" category included: Circulation Manager Assistant Director with background in Government Documents Library consultant Archivist with a library degree working in a library -- What best describes your current workplace? Academic Library - 63.9% Special Library - 2.8% State Library - 33.3% Other options were offered on the survey, but only the three categories above had non-zero responses. -- Are you allowed work time to edit your page? Yes - 88.9% No - 11.1% The project coordinator is one of the people whose currrent job description is too far outside the project work to justify using work time to maintain his pages or write these reports. In full disclosure, I have not asked to. -- Where do you edit your page? Work - 58.3% Home - 11.1% Home and Work - 30.6% -- Do you live in the state of the page you edit? (If you have more than one state, choose "other" and note which state you live in.) Yes - 77.1% No - 17.1% Other (please specify) - 5.7% In addition to the demographic questions above, volunteers were asked several narrative questions. We'll be bringing those questions and selected responses to you over the next three weeks. Continue reading →

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