Tag Archives: GODORT

According to the Census Bureau, by 2030 one in five Americans, including me, will be 65 or older. It's never too early to prepare for old age, it seems like a good time to highlight this guide linked from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange: Selected Bibliography of Gerontology Resources in the Social Work Library, with Selected Web Resources (Sally Haines Lawler, University of Michigan, 2003) Last updated 9/26/2006 The scope note (introduction) to the guide emphasizes that this list is not comprehensive and that people should contact library staff for additional resources. While not comprehensive, the guide is pretty extensive with lists of books, journals, databases, web sites and more. A too brief sample of what's available includes:

• Andersson, L. (Ed.). (2002). Cultural gerontology. Westport, Conn.: Auburn House. HQ 1061 .C7931 2002
• Birren, J.E. (2001). Telling the stories of life through guided autobiography groups. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. RC 953.8 .R43 B5751 2001
• American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. Albany, NY: American Orthopsychiatric Association * Full text available only to U-M students; available on campus at Social Work Library (1988-present), Shapiro Undergraduate Library (1980-present) * Indexed in: AGELINE, Psychological Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, Social Work Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts
• AGELINE Conduct a subject search for gerontology. Also try subject searches for social gerontology, geropsychology, psychological aging, biological aging, successful aging, older adults, old old, and young old. Try to be as specific as possible in this database, as it covers aging and older adults, in particular the social, psychological, economic, policy and health care aspects. For additional information, see the Social Work Library's guide "How to Search CSA Illumina."
• http://www.americangeriatrices.org/ American Geriatrics Society.

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Since energy policy has been in the news most of this year, it seems like a good time to highlight this guide from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange: Energy (Ed Herman, University of Buffalo, 2007) Ed has produced an annotated listing of web resources to these aspects of energy:

• National Policy Issues
• US Statistics
• Technical Information
• Nuclear Energy
• New York State
• International Data
• Additional Information

• The Energy Source (U.S. Congress. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources) http://energy.senate.gov/ The hearings and news room sections are the most informative parts of this site. These abbreviated hearings reproduce testimonies of witnesses before the full committee and the subcommittees, but exclude dialogs among the witnesses and the Committee members. The Business and Government Documents Reference Center maintains the complete hearings in paper format. The news room includes two sets of press releases issued by the Committee Chair and the ranking minority member.
• States (U.S. Department of Energy. Energy Information Administration) http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/states/_seds.html Presents energy statistics pertaining to the 50 states.
• Building Energy Codes (U.S. Department of Energy. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy) http://www.energycodes.gov/ Attempts to promote improved energy codes for buildings by working with government agencies, national code organizations, and industry. It also hopes to develop and distribute compliance tools; and provide financial and technical assistance to states.
• Nuclear Power Information Tracker (Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS)) http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/nuclear_safety/reactor-map/embedded-flash-map.html Select power plants from a map or a list to view a brief box that describes safety issues and a detailed statement that cites the reactor's owners, locations, populations within a 10-mile radius, and safety issues. Links lead to more detailed documentation.
• International Energy Annual (U.S. Department of Energy. Energy Information Administration) http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/iea/contents.html Provides information and trends on world energy production and consumption for petroleum; natural gas; coal; and electricity. Statistics measuring population and GDP put the data in context. View information in PDF format or download Excel files that offer longer time series.

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One of the harder to find classes of government documents are declassified documents. In many cases these are not within the scope of the Federal Depository Library Program, so there isn't a centralized place to find them. Sometimes they're not actual publications, but stuff like memos, celebrity FBI files and the like. If you're researching public policy, especially national security, stuff that might be helpful might be declassified or subject to declassification under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). But before you start filing that FOIA request, check out today's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange, because what you want might already be out there: Declassified Government Documents (UC-Berkeley, 2004) CC Last updated 9/15/2006 I really like how this guide starts out. Because the Berkeley librarians understand that declassified documents are a misty topic to most people, they start with an introduction:

About Declassified Documents Documents may be classified for many reasons - issues of national security or privacy. A popular misconception is that when a document is declassified, it is somehow systematically made available to the public, for example, distributed to depository libraries. This is most often not the case. Exceptions to this might be

• a highly-publicized document is published as a part of an investigation. E.g. The Munson Report, a report from the fall of 1941 stemming from an intelligence gathering investigation on the loyalty of Japanese Americans is one of these exceptions. It was declassified and published as one of the many appendices in the Hearings held by the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack in 1946.
• a document series that is specifically published by the government for researchers (e.g. Foreign Relations of the U.S. or the Library of Congress Presidential Papers collections).

As there are no clear patterns of publication for most declassified documents, it falls to the researcher interested in a document that is declassified to research which agency created the document, who may have researched the document originally, and where it might be now. The guides and resources shown below are intended to assist the research in finding federal records that have been declassified as part of the routine declassification, as well as records that are declassified through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests and other kinds of investigations.

• The encyclopedia of American intelligence and espionage : from the Revolutionary War to the present. G.J.A. O'Toole. New York : Facts on File, c1988. UB271.U5 O85 1988 GREF References individuals, committees, and operations. Many of the entries have footnotes.
• Unlocking the files of the FBI : a guide to its records and classification system by Gerald K. Haines and David A. Langbart. Wilmington, Del. : Scholarly Resources, 1993. HV8144.F43 H35 1993 GREF
• OpenNet via Department of Energy OpenNet includes references to all documents declassified and made publicly available after October 1, 1994. New references are added periodically as they occur. These collections include citations to several types of documents. Some have been declassified in total, and are termed "declassified." Others have had classified or other restricted information removed to produce a "sanitized" copy. The term "redacted" is sometimes used to refer to these documents.

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