IE vs Firefox Text Fixed

Goodness, I just realized that my blog posts had centered text in IE (Internet Explorer). How horrible looking! It looked fine in a Firefox browser. Lesson learned: check your HTML, XML, and CSS coding compatability with different types of browsers. Anyways, I fixed the coding and the blog looks great with both IE and Firefox. Hoorah!

If you are curious about web design and user compatability, we have a government document on that very subject both online and in print on the 4th floor, SuDoc Call No. HE 1.2:W 38/2006.

UC Berkeley's Media Database

Thanks to a recent entry at the MSU Philosophy Club Blog , I now know about a great new resource from UC Berkeley: The Online Media Database! You can view and listen to speeches by the Black Panthers, Anti-Vietnam War Protests, etc. You can even listen to the Watergate Tapes (transcripts from NARA). Just browse some of their holdings...it's fascinating to watch these videos. Here is a video from the "Red Scare" era, produced by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).

Virtual Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall

If you wish to pay your respects but cannot travel to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in D.C., can now do so from your computer. NARA and Footnote.com have released a searchable digital replica of the Memorial Wall.


The site also allows you to "leave a tribute, a story or photograph about any of the 58,256 veterans killed or missing in the Vietnam War".

Word of warning, the site claims that due to recent high traffic, you might experience slow loading pages or images. They are working to improve this.

For more information about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, visit it's NPS official website and it's Library of Congress website.

Take me out to the ball game...

Are you a baseball fan? Then you'll love the webpage that the Library of Congress created: Historical Baseball Resources. They just launched it and it includes player profiles, historical news and events, collection guides, audio/video presentations, access to a sampling of visual images, and unique sound artifacts.

Duck and Cover!!

Several student patrons are working on research papers about the Cold War era and some are focusing on the nuclear arms race and the fear of nuclear attack. It's been fascinating finding and reading materials we have in our print collection, including information published by the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) in the 1950s and the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (OCDM) during the Kennedy administration. (For a concise history of civil defense preparedness, read "Civil Defense and Homeland Security: A Short History of National Preparedness Efforts" published by the Homeland Security National Preparedness Task Force).

I thought I'd share some of these online government sources I've discovered in my hunt for all things Cold War/Civil Defense related:

* Clips of historical "test" films at the DOE agency website.
* "Mr. Civil Defense Tells About Natural Disasters!" A government document comic book!
* "In Time of Emergency: A Citizen's Handbook on Nuclear Attack, Natural Disasters" (1968).
* The "Survival Under Atomic Attack" booklet can be found in federal depositories, but here is an online transcription.
* NARA records of the OCDM.
* "Atomic Culture" article by the U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission.
* Not a government source, but a virtual Civil Defense Museum website created by a Civil Defense enthusiast.
* "Civil Defense Logo Dies at 67, and Some Mourn It's Passing" article at NYTimes.com.

And my favorite...Civil Defense videos!

* Internet Archive's collection of Civil Defense Films and other media/film resources on civil defense.
* Some of YouTube's collection of Civil Defense Films.

Did they really think ducking n' covering under a school desk would protect them from a nuclear attack?

Census Atlas

The Census Bureau has published the Census Atlas of the United States, available online and in print. According to GPO, the new Atlas is an "authoritative reference work that paints a fascinating and dynamic portrait of the American nation. It includes more than 700 full-color maps derived from 210 years of official Census data".

If you love maps or visual data, come see this beautiful atlas up here on the 4th floor, SuDocs Call No. C 3.205/8-3:29

OpenCongress Web 2.0 Tools

FYI, this is a post I created for the FGI Blog and based on an earlier post I created for this blog.

Here is a great example of "Government Documents 2.0" in action: OpenCongress.org offers several Web 2.0 tools such as the OpenCongress Facebook application, where you can put bills that interest you on your Facebook profile. You can show your support or opposition to each bill, or simply remain neutral by selecting the "just following" option. Each bill links back to OpenCongress, so your patrons or friends can get all the information they need in order to understand and become involved with the issues themselves.

One of their Web 2.0 tools that I use for my GovGuides Wiki (a work in progress, mind you!), is the "Bill by Issue Widget". I created one for the Environmental Law GovGuides Wiki page I'm working on. It displays the latest bills introduced in Congress on anything to do with environmental law enforcement.

If you are not familiar with OpenCongress, it's a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource "with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement". OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. It uses data provided by GovTrack.us, which collects data from official government websites, such as Thomas. For more info, see previous FGI posts about OpenCongress: My OpenCongress, Congress Remix, and FGI's "Remixes page".

OpenCongress makes it easy to understand each bill by giving a brief summary, who sponsored it, its status, and related bills. And yes, there are links to the full text of the bill and its voting history from Thomas. However, I do encourage students in my instruction classes to cite the original sources that OpenCongress leads them to, such as the full text of the bill from Thomas, congressional record references, or the homepages that OpenCongress links to for various committees and congressmen, etc. And of course I remind them that not everything is online, especially older government information, so they must turn to the print sources that I show them how to locate and use. By that time, the students are much more apt to pay attention and understand the importance of the exotic experience of handling/using the 1945 volume of the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications or a Congressional Record volume from 1918. ;-)

I find OpenCongress to be a very user friendly and a convenient "one stop shop" for learning about legislation. Students in my library instruction classes seem to love using it, so if it gets them excited about government information, then I love it too!

Economic Report of the President, 2008

GPO-FDLP Announcement, FYI: The Economic Report of the President, 2008 is available online from the U.S. Government Printing Office. Documents are available in ASCII text and .pdf format, with many of the tables also available for separate viewing and downloading as spreadsheets in xls format. The Economic Report of the President is issued by the Executive Office of the President and the Council of Economic Advisers and transmitted to Congress no later than ten days after the submission of the Budget of the United States Government.

The Economic Report of the President includes:
- Trends and annual numerical goals on various topics such as employment, production, real income, and Federal budget outlays
- Employment objectives for significant groups of the labor force
- A program for carrying out program objectives

Also included is the Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers. Each year, the Council of Economic Advisers submits this report on its activities during the previous calendar year in accordance with the requirements of Congress as set forth in section 10(d) of the Employment Act of 1946 as amended by the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978.

In addition, you can find the print version of the Economic Report of the President at your local federal depository libary or at the McNeese Library on the 4th floor:

Economic Report of the President
Sudoc No. PR 43.9:

FGI Blog Posts & Federal Finance Resources

Here are some links to my recent FGI Blog Posts that may be of interest to you (some are adaptations of postings I've previously written on this blog):

Government Agencies Tweet @ Twitter
EPA Declared Guilty of "Bad Faith" in its Library Closures
Creating Gov Doc "Libraries" in Google Books
Public Dissatisfied with Government Financial Transparency
Open Government: Sunshine Week March 16-22

Speaking of government financial transparency, here are some great resources on federal finance and spending:

The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which went into effect on New Years Day '08 with the release of USAspending.gov, a site that "gives people access to information on government contracts, grants and other awards".

USAspending.gov is based on the software that runs Fedspending.org, a site created by OMB Watch. Fedspending.org is a "free, searchable database of approximately $16.8 trillion in Federal government spending, with complete annual data from FY 2000 through FY 2006 and partial data available for FY 2007".

Daylight Saving Time

I woke up late this morning and much to my chagrin, I realized it was even later than I thought it was. I completely forgot that today was Daylight Saving Time (DST) and neglected to set my clocks an hour ahead!

DST used to take place in April, but since 2007, it now takes place the second Sunday of March, as mandated by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. To make things more confusing, if you live in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, or Arizona(exception...the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona), you do not observe DST. Lucky you.

One of the reasons we change our clocks to DST is to save energy. DST allows an extra hour of daylight, thus less electricity would be used for lighting and appliances late in the day. Although some studies refute this claim. So who knows...a few years from now the DST guidelines could change again. I just hope I remember to set my clock ahead on the right day...

Women's History Month

In 1981, Congress passed a resolution establishing National Women's History Week but in 1987, Congress lengethened it to a whole month. The theme of this year's National Women's History Month is "Women's Art, Women's Vision."

For more government resources on women's history, visit the following:

Dept. of Education Women's History Resources.

Census Bureau's Facts for Features page on Women's History Month.

National Women's History Project

Library of Congress Women's History Month

LLA Conference PowerPoint Presentation

Ta da! Here it is: my PowerPoint presentation from the LLA 2008 Conference. You can download it for your own personal use. I will be posting a bibliography of resources soon.

| View | Upload your own

FYI...if you don't like some of the other free site traffic measurement tools out there, try Google Analytics. After my presentation, an audience member reminded me of this tool. It's great for measuring site visits to your wiki subject guides, blog, websites, social networking profiles, etc. that you can include in your annual reports. All you do is enter info about your site and you copy and paste the auto-generated code into your website or a certain page you want to track. The best part, is that no one will see the code on your page...it's "invisible". Only you can see the traffic stats it generates on your Google Analytics account page. I like that privacy option. And I like that they understand you may not want an ugly traffic counter at the bottom of your page!

For those of you who attended my presentation, I hope you enjoyed it even though the conference hotel's wireless connectivity copped out on us for most of it. (I wanted to crawl under the desk and just die). Next time I will have more screen shots prepared. Live and learn. I thank those of you who came up to me afterwards with your praise and your enthusiasm. It made me so happy to see your excitement about trying out some of these tools I discussed. Feel free to contact me if you have questions or just want to chat about your ideas!

My LLA Conference Presentation: "Government Documents 2.0"

I will be presenting at the Louisiana Library Conference in Shreveport, LA - March 5th at 9 AM. My presentation is entitled: "Government Documents 2.0: Web 2.0 Initiatives for Depository Library Websites". Explore ways of using social media and web 2.0 tools to access and promote government information at all levels! Frazar Library’s Government Documents Department at McNeese will show how website tools can enhance interest and access to government information.

For those of you who cannot attend, I will post the PowerPoint presentation and handouts on this blog after the conference is over.

More Government Agencies/NGOs Using Twitter

The U.S. Department of State created a dipnote Twitter account for alerting users to new posts on their DIPNOTE Blog.

The Sunlight Foundation is twittering public laws as they are signed.

NASA on Twitter...Finally Found!

Remember my post about Government Agencies using Twitter? I had complained that I couldn't find NASA on Twitter, but I did find their page on Facebook. Well...after two hours of hunting, I finally found their official NASA Twitter account. It was not prominently linked on nasa.gov but I did stumble upon it via the NASA Edge website and their Twitter page. I feel a sense of closure now. Mystery solved!

I'm Blogger of the Month @ FGI

If you are interested in government information, government transparency, government info access issues, etc. then check out the Free Government Information (FGI) Blog where I am "Blogger of the Month!" I'll be posting almost every day with some news and commentary. I am very honored to be a part of their site, as it is one of my favorites. *does a dance of joy* Woo!

Louisiana 2008-2012 Term

The State & Local Government in Louisiana: An Overview, 2008-2012 Term has been published and made available online. Since I'm a newbie to Louisiana, (born and raised in Rhode Island) I'm still learning about Louisiana government and politics, so I sure do appreciate how informative this publication is!

Also, you might want to get to know more about our new Governor, Bobby Jindal at the Office of the Governor website. Make sure to view the page on ethics reform, one of Jindal's major initiatives. Legislation recently passed during the 2008 1st Extraordinary Session includes House Bill 1 (HB1): Enacts personal financial disclosures for the vast majority of elected and appointed officials in state and local government for the first time in Louisiana’s history.

The 1st Extraordinary session ended on February 26th. Here is a subject index of bills introduced during the 2008 1st Extraordinary Session and the "Governor's Call" for the 2008 1st Extraordinary Session.

The 2008 Regular Legislative Session will convene at noon on Monday, March 31, 2008.