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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
- 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.
Ode to Govdoc-L
I was cleaning my condo today and ran across a "government documents jounral" that I turned in as an assignment in grad school back in 1995. Part of what I did for this assignment was to subscribe to Govdoc-l, the documents librarians' electronic mailing list. I had to report my impressions. The three things I cited 13 years ago were:
- Govdoc-L is practical.
- Govdoc'rs are helpful
- Govdoc-l is informative
Stupid Gov’t PDF Tricks
Stephen Abrams of OPAC vendor SirsiDynix talks government documents and relates his pet peeves about how governments use PDFs to hide information. As Stephen is Canadian, I'm not sure what government he's talking about, but some of his complaints sound familar to me:
3. Worse, let's create a 10,000 page PDF and try to ask any citizen to download and print that! If your report is too short to make it too big, just append all your data into the appendices and make it HUGE.
5. Place your PDF on your website and don't link it to with an index, table of contents, press release or some other finding tool. Make sure there are no links for the seacrh engine crawlers to crawl! You have plausible deniabliity and can say with a straight face that it's available on the web!
6. And my favourite government opacity strategy? Only place a minimum of metadata on the PDF on the web. Say, just a number like 1237D-f but make sure it's not linked to any real number and just represents a non-sequential accession number for the web file. Then it will be nigh on impossible to find it.
His other tricks make a good read too, but then I'd be reproducing his entire posting. He ends his posting with thanks to librarians and catalogers. Stephen doesn't usually talk about docs, he's more of a Web 2.0/Library 2.0 sort of guy, but his Stephen's Lighthouse blog is always interesting reading.
Continue readingTough Government Documents Make Librarians Tougher
A coworker tipped me off to a law-lib posting by Brent Johnson about a panel at the American Association of Law Librarians annual meeting that sounds like it was a riot: GD-SIS Program: Tough Librarians Rise to the Challenge with Tough Government Documents Andrew P. Evans gave a talk on Combative and Military Government Documents that offered these citizen benefits to reading military docs:
- The military’s ability to evolve combat techniques.
- Real world application
- Gun and knife safety.
- Question the techniques- it’s your civic duty
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