As part of their activities in the last ALA annual meeting, the GODORT State and Local Documents Task Force (SLDTF) approved the creation of a fifty-state registry of state government produced databases on the new GODORT wiki. SLDTF believes that there will be great value to librarians and end users alike in having the "invisible web" of state produced databases together in one place. You can find the home page for this project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. Right now, only Alaska has a developed page which you can find at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Alaska as an example for what SLDTF hopes the other state pages will look like. Once this registry is complete, it will have a number of uses, not the least of which will be showing that documents librarians are tech savvy people who know where the information is buried even when Google can't find it. BUT, they need your help to make this happen. There are four ways you can help with this project: 1) Go to the wiki and start adding any databases you are familar with. Just click on the "edit" tab. Registering with the GODORT wiki is recommended but not required. 2) Agree to be a "documents specialist" for a particular state and post your contact information so people who are not comfortable with editing wikis can e-mail updates to you. 3) Recruit state agency department webmasters, other state employees or other subject specialists to contribute to the database listing. 4) As you become aware of a new state (or local) government database, e-mail Daniel Cornwall, project coordinator (dan DOT cornwall AT Alaska DOT gov) or the documents specialist for that state if you are not comfortable with editing a wiki. To me, this seems like a perfect collaboration project for the documents community. You WILL benefit from learning where your state's databases are and posting them to this annotated registry. The rest of us will benefit from having similar databases available from the fifty states and learning about your state's unique content. So, help ALA GODORT and yourselves by contributing to this project! If you adopt a state's page, would you leave a comment here so people can see how the registry is coming along? Continue reading →

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