Hello from D.C.!

Yes, the Gov Doc Librarian on the Bayou is blogging from her conference hotel room in Washington, D.C. tonight. I've been attending the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) Conference in Arlington, VA (just outside of D.C.) and I am learning so much from other Government Document Librarians via lectures, council sessions or networking. I even got to meet one of my favorite Gov Doc Bloggers, Starr Hoffman. She co-presented a very informative session on finding and digitally archiving those elusive Congressional Research Service Reports. She maintains the digital archive database of CRS Reports at the University of North Texas and is a fellow GODORT member.

CRS Reports are produced for Members of Congress by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a public policy research branch of Congress. However, these incredibly informative, nonpartisan, and detailed reports (on all kinds of subjects based on current legislation or "hot topics") are not directly accessible to the public. Citizens must request them from their Member of Congress. The good news is that some Members of Congress or non-profit orgs have uploaded these CRS Reports to their websites, and it is Starr's responsibility to help find, retrieve, and archive these full-text digital reports into the website's database. I highly recommend visiting, browsing, and searching the site! These reports will be of immense help in your research or to foster overall understanding of any kind of topic, including Defense Policy or immigration. Since UNT's database is not a complete collection of CRS Reports, you can find them through other sources listed on UNT's CRS Reports page. Oh, and stop by here to find out how to urge Congress to provide public access to all these reports! After all, your tax dollars (ahem...$100 million) help fund the CRS. OpenCRS.net has an RSS feed to alert you of new CRS reports as they are submitted by various users of the site, such as this one on Burma Sanctions.

I also just learned that Wednesday afternoon will be a busy day on Capitol Hill and at the Library of Congress, because according to the Library of Congress Blog, the Dalai Lama will be in town to accept his Congressional Gold Medal! This is the nation's "highest civilian honor" and is the highest honor that Congress can bestow (George Washington was the first to receive it in 1776). So I'll be heading to the West Lawn of the Capitol to watch the Tibetan performances and cultural activities (and hopefully catch the Dalai Lama's give a speech!), as well as visiting the Tibetan exhibit at the Library of Congress.

It's opportunities like these that make me feel so grateful to be a Government Documents librarian. I'll be sure to take some photos and share them with you in future postings. When the FDLP conference program handouts and presentations are available on the FDLP website, I'll provide links to these as well. Meanwhile, take a look at the beta version of their new website at www.fdlp.gov to learn more about the depository program and the world of government documents.

National Strategy for Homeland Security Update

FYI...the White House released the new National Strategy for Homeland Security which you can download as a PDF. A fact sheet on this new strategy and the 2002 version can be found at the whitehouse.gov site.

Gov Docs in Google Books

I was searching for Civil War era government documents for a History Professor yesterday, and I realized that we did not own one of the documents he sought. Before suggesting that he interlibrary loan a copy of this document, I decided to search online for a full-text digitized version. Alas, it did not exist in the digital realm, but I did find some other digitized gov docs pertaining to his research needs in Google Books.

Out of curiosity, I did a Google Book search for other types of government publications and found these gems:

Trial of the Conspirators, for the Assassination of President Lincoln

Illustrations of the Gross Morbid Anatomy of the Brain in the Insane (isn't that a Cypress Hill song? Nevermind...) by the Government Hospital for the Insane.

How it Feels to be the Husband of a Suffragette (not published by the Government Printing Office, but it is a book housed in the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection in the Library of Congress).

Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion

Most of these documents were scanned by staff at large research libraries or federal depositories, such as those at Harvard or the University of Michigan. The quality is usually decent but can sometimes border on the illegible. I was quite amused when I discovered a staff person's hand digitized on this document's cover:


However, there are bigger snafus than a digitized librarian's hand. For example, despite government documents being in the public domain (i.e. freely available to access; not protected by copyright) Google Books treats post-1922 (i.e. post-copyright law) government documents as copyrighted material by only allowing a limited view! The Prelinger Library Blog discusses how this paradox and I discovered it first hand when I did a search for documents on the Pearl Harbor attacks. When viewing a document's summary, very few pages (if any) were available for a "snippet view":


Talk about frustrating! Thank goodness many local depositories, including ours, own a copy in print or in microfiche (shameless plug).

At least some documents librarians, scholars, and citizens are voicing their frustrations over these issues, including the American Historical Association blog in this entry: "Google Books: What's Not to Like".

Another quandry is the lack of data on approximately how many federal government documents are digitized by Google Books. For more discussion on this, visit Julia Tryon's blog entries about her Google Books/Gov Docs investigations at the Free Government Information (FGI) website.

Despite these issues, I decided to take advantage of the access to full-text, pre-1922 government documents and create a McNeese Gov Docs "Library" account in Google Books where you can also subscribe to updates of its holdings via an RSS feed. I'll add more of these interesting and old documents as I come across them, especially those pertaining to Louisiana.


To try your own search for government documents in Google Books, start by clicking on "advanced search" in order to limit your results in various ways:


Besides typing in your search terms and keywords, you can choose to view or download only an entire government document by selecting "full view". Then, in the Publisher field, type in Govt OR GPO OR "Government Printing Office". You can also search by agency, (i.e. "Department of the Interior") by typing the name of the agency in the Author field. You may have to try several different search strategies to yield the results you want. Here are my results after following this method and using the keyword phrase "Abraham Lincoln":


Clicking on the cover or title link will allow you to view, print, or download/save the full text, or you can "add it" to your own library (you'll need a google account) if you so choose.



Have fun exploring and building your own digital collections, but please let me know if you find some really cool gov docs, ok?