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
Guide of the Week: Anthropology
This week's "Guide of the Week" from the GODORT Handout Exchange is: Government Documents for Anthropologists (Word file) (Jennie Burroughs, University of Montana, 2008) CC Like a number of guides in the Handout Exchange, this guide was created for a college course. Because people, including government scholars, have been writing about anthropology for a long time, it has a mix of print and electronic sources including: -------------- Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology Call number: SI 1.33: A monographic series published irregularly. American Memory Collection URL: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ The Library of Congress is building an extensive digital library collection. The American Memory collection includes a wide variety of materials: photographs, correspondence, manuscripts, sound recordings, motion pictures, etc. Folklife materials are included in this digital collection. NARA 1930 Census http://1930census.archives.gov/ The 1930 Census is the most recent Census to become available to the public. NARA has an online database that can help you to identify the microfilm roll you need. Then, take that roll number to the microfilm drawers (call number: 312.0973 U58p 1930) to find the relevant reel. General Land Office Records & Maps - The Bureau of Land Management has created a Federal Land Patents Database that allows you to search for General Land Office grants issued between 1820 and 1908. You can perform a basic search, where you can search by state and patentee name, or a standard search, where you can search by patentee name, by a particular location (described by county, section, township, range, etc.), or by date and land office. http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/ ------------- 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 2.5 License. So as long as you provide credit to Jennie Burroughs, you could change her library's call numbers to your own, and print out as many handouts for your students as you like. The above resources are just a highlight of what's available in the guide. See it for yourself, then check out what else is available. And if you're a docs librarian with a handout of your own, link it to the wiki! Continue reading
Reference Renaissance: Session Writeups
For those who are interested in what I learned at Reference Renaissance, please visit http://alaskanlibrarian.wordpress.com/category/rr2008/, where you can find all of my session writeups. I didn't cross post here because I think most of what I picked up was out of scope for FGI. But a few themes from the conference that I think worth mentioning here are:
- Librarians must support patrons as content creators in addition to supporting them as content users.
- Reference (including document reference) needs to move from supplying stacks of documents to providing more targeted information, along with providing context.
- Librarians must continue to find non-traditional venues to be where information users are.