Guides of the Week: Georgia and Russia
Because they've been in the news, I'm highlighting the Georgia and Russia country guides produced by the Government Publications Library at the University of Colorado at Boulder, that have just been posted to the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange. Both guides are broken down into the following sections:
- Government (direct from country) Information
- Country Profiles
- Articles & Databases
- Diplomatic Relations
- Health
- Peacekeeping & Military Information
- Resources in the Catalog
- Related Topics
Help USGS Find the Missing!
While searching at the USGS Publications Warehouse, I noticed one of the available tabs was MIA. Clicking on this tab brought me to the MIA Publication page, where USGS asked the public's help in tracking down missing publications. Here's their explanation:
Listed below are all the USGS series that are currently or will soon be loaded into the Publication Warehouse. Each series may have missing report numbers or unverifiable citations. Missing report numbers are gaps in the numbering sequence of a series. We do not know if the report was ever released or if there is a reason why the report number was skipped. These reports may have been cancelled, recalled, or destroyed. Report numbers may have been issued in blocks and some may never have been used. Unverified citations Unverified citations are citations for any publication where there was some information about the publication available but that information could not be confirmed, the publication itself has not been found, and we are not sure if the publication was actually released. Many of the unverified reports were found referenced by other publications as "in press".Please visit the site for a list of the missing and help out if you can. You'll be responsible for putting more government information on the web. Continue reading
Some exciting things have been happening at GPO in the world of digitization
As you have likely heard by now, we have a goal of digitizing all retrospective federal publications back to the earliest days of the Federal Government. A Request for Proposal (RFP) for Mass Digitization Opportunities has now been released via Federal Business Opportunities. Here's a link to this proposal and additional information on GPO's digitization initiatives. Proposals are due by September 19, 2008. We are in search of a cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship with a private or public sector participants where the uncompressed, unaltered files created as a result of the conversion process are delivered to GPO at no cost to the Government. These files will serve as the digital master copies that will be preserved and used for the creation of access derivatives within GPO's Federal Digital System. In exchange, the contractor will be able to maintain a collection of files produced in the process for inclusion in their collections (e.g., search indices, book search sites). This content will be made available online, free of charge from GPO. Also, if you haven't yet seen it, we have re-launched the Registry of U.S. Government Publication Digitization Projects, which contains records for projects that include digitized copies of publications originating from the U.S. Government. The Registry...
- serves as a locator tool for publicly accessible collections of digitized U.S. Government publications;
- increases awareness of U.S. Government publication digitization projects that are planned, in progress, or completed;
- fosters collaboration for digitization projects;
Promoting Your Depository Library
Ever have trouble coming up with new, cost-effective ways to promote the important services offered at your depository? Ever wonder how to reach different audiences? Ever wish there were tools to help you promote your library? At GPO, we heard you, and recently, we took on the challenge of helping you with those difficult tasks. We recently launched the FDLP Marketing Plan, which has three main components:
- Tips and strategies to help depositories promote themselves to non-depository libraries.
- Tips and strategies to help depositories promote themselves to the general public (broken down by group).
- The launch of a new marketing campaign that has tools that depositories can use in their promotion efforts.
ASAP: help the Internet Archive archive the Georgia/Russia conflict
You may or may not have heard of "disaster capitalism." Well here's a case of "disaster web harvesting!" I just got an email from our friends at the Internet Archive. They're the ones that preserve the 85 billion+ web pages from 1996 to the present and make them all freely accessible in the Wayback Machine (WOW!!). Well at 4:30 Pacific Time, they're going to set up an Archive-It collection to crawl sites regarding the crisis unfolding between Russia and Georgia. If you've got a favorite site that you've been using to track this crisis, please send urls to Molly Bragg (mbragg AT archive DOT org). Thanks! Continue reading