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Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

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:

    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
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 License. So as long as you provide credit to Ed Herman, you could change his library's call numbers to your own, and print out as many handouts for your students as you like. Check out the rest of this guide. Then see what else is available. Are you a librarian with a govdocs handout to share? Add your handout to the Exchange Wiki by either linking your handout to the wiki or typing the handout into the wiki. Need help? Ask Daniel at dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net. Continue reading

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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

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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 States
In addition to listing basic resources such as: He also points out agencies likely to have agricultural related publications at various levels of government: This guide highlights an important feature of librarian expertise -- the ability to pull together information sources on a topic from multiple levels of government in a meaningful way. So if you're interested in Agriculture from Indiana to Argentina, check out the rest of this guide. Then see what else is available. Continue reading

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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
Because the Handout Exchange links to many resources that could help many people outside the depository community, FGI is proud to start a new "Guide of the Week" column to highlight these librarian generated resources. Our first highlight is from the subject guide page: Afro-Americans and the Military, 1939-45 (Denise Schoene, Univ. of Michigan, 1997) Last updated 8/6/2004 This guide provides a number of resources to the history of African Americans during this period including: These resources would be helpful for reports on military history, assignments for Black History Month or creating any number of library displays. So check out the full guide. Then see what other topics are available. Continue reading

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