Beyond the Walls of the United Nations: Exploring U.N. Databases

Speakers:
Maria Paniagua, United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold Library
Susan Kurtas, United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold Library

This was a great session by two librarians at the United Nations, focused on showing how to access U.N. materials online (and there is a lot more available than I thought). Maria Paniagua presented first and talking about four different specific U.N. resources:

United Nations Documentation: Research Guide (http://www.un.org/Depts/dhl/resguide/)
United Nations Bibliographic Information System, aka UNBISnet (http://unbisnet.un.org/)
United Nations Official Documents System, aka ODS (http://documents.un.org/welcome.asp?language=E)
UN-Info-Quest, aka UN-I-QUE (http://lib-unique.un.org/lib/unique.nsf)

Just like with Defense information, it may be helpful to take a look at the UN’s organizational chart (http://www.un.org/aboutun/chart_en.pdf) to identify what organization within the U.N. is most likely to produce or maintain the information you are interested in.

The Research Guide is a good place to start to get an overview of UN documents. In particular learning how UN Document Symbols work will help identify what you are seeing. U.N. librarians to respond to questions from the public, but only through email. If you’ve taken a look at the Research Guide and you are still confused however, it’s good to know about that option.

Official records from U.N. meetings can take anywhere from a few days to a few months to come out, but in the meantime, you can use the press releases to get an overview of what occurred.

UNBISnet provides access to three different sets of records:
Bibliographic Records (aka, the UN’s OPAC)

• The OPAC covers materials from 1979 to the present. Records for earlier materials from 1946 to 1978 remain in a card catalog.
• You can do some pretty advance searching in the OPAC, in particular you can limit by type of material and UN or non-UN documents.
• If the full text of the document is available online, you will be able to link straight into it from the catalog record.
• There is an UNBIS thesaurus available in the OPAC, which is useful if you don’t know if a subject is valid. The thesaurus is available in all 6 official languages of the UN, so it can also be used to translate a subject.

Voting Records

• Voting records from the Security Council are available all the way back to 1946.
• Voting records from the General Assembly are currently available back to 1967, however they are in the process of going all the way back and those record should be available in the next few months.
• In addition to the record of the vote itself, you will also be able to link to the full text of the resolution being voted on if it is available.

Index to Speeches

• Able to do some advanced searching (limiting by topic, country, U.N. body in which the speech occurred, etc).
• Link to the full-text of the speech in any of the U.N.’s 6 official languages.

Once you know what you are looking for, UNBISnet is probably the best place to start looking.

ODS was started in 1992 as a databank and contains all official publications from that time period forward (as well as some older materials that have been add retrospectively). The U.N. librarians didn’t not recommend it for advanced searches (UNBISnet being better for those), but you can use it for full-text searching, which is helpful if you are looking for something super specific.

Everything in ODS is full-text. However, UNBISnet has broader coverage (because it has records for documents even if they aren’t available in full-text).

UN-I-QUE is a ready-reference file. Per the official UN-I-QUE description, it:

“provide[s] quick access to document symbols/sales numbers for UN materials (1946 onwards). It does not give full bibliographic details nor does it replace existing bibliographic databases (UNBISnet) produced by the Library. UN-I-QUE focuses upon documents and publications of a recurrent nature: annual/sessional reports of committees/commissions; annual publications; reports periodically/irregularly issued; reports of major conferences; statements in the General Debate; etc. Information within each record is presented in reverse chronological order to facilitate identification of the most recent data.”

There is no subject searching in UN-I-QUE – it only searches titles. However, it does contain records of some materials not in UNBISnet or ODS. These are only bibliographic records. There is no full text.

Susan Kurtas then spoke about some specific legal websites of the U.N.

The International Law Commission (http://www.un.org/law/ilc/) has digitized all of their documents back to 1947. The also have a Research Guide accessible from their homepage that will help with that sort of research.

UNCITRAL: The UN Commission on International Trade Law (http://www.uncitral.org/uncitral/en/index.html) has also digitized many (although not all) of their documents.

The United Nations Treaty Collection (http://treaties.un.org/Pages/Home.aspx?lang=en) is a work in progress. Susan described it as “glitchy” which certainly fits what I have found in the past when I tried to use it (so it was reassuring to know that even the U.N. librarians struggled with it). The advanced search works best in Internet Explorer. If the text of the treaty is available it will be linked from the bibliographic record. Unfortunately at the moment, it will link to the full UNTS volume that the treaty appeared in, which means that it is a HUGE file.

The search of the Index is a phrase search (despite the fact that is says “keyword”), so if you put it two words, it is only going to be looking for them as a phrase.

The final resource mentioned was their new Audiovisual Library of International Law (http://www.un.org/law/avl/), which I think would be especially useful/interesting to academic law libraries. The Historical Archives contains audio and a video recordings of historic UN speeches, as well as still photographs of momentous occasions. The Lecture Series contains video lectures by International Law experts in specific subject areas (as well as links to related resources). The Lecture Series is non-UN content, part of their effort to assist in the teaching/study of international law, especially in the developing world.

Reporting for Duty: Military Information and Its Application to Legal Research

Speakers:
Betsy Jayasuriya, Pentagon Library
Stephen E. Young, Catholic University of America

I have to say that I thought this session was excellent. I don’t have to search for military/defense information too often, but when I do, I find it to be quite a challenge, and this session really helped me figure out some good places to start. Also, I had no real understanding of how the military justice system worked, and this session answered those questions as well.

Betsy Jayasuriya, a librarian at the Pentagon Library, spoke first and went through places to look for Defense information. The first resource she suggested was the DoD Dictionary of Military Terms (http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/), which is especially helpful if you have an acronym and no idea what it stands for.
A few acronym that were specifically mentioned:
FOUO – For Official Use Only
PII – Personally Indentifying Information
OpSec – Operational Security

She then stated that information at the Department of Defense was very siloed, so if you were interested in finding a particular piece of information or publication, and you weren’t sure who might have it, that you might want to take a look at the Department of Defense org chart. (My one criticism of Betsy’s presentation, which really was excellent was that she didn’t provide URLs for resources she mentioned, and I haven’t been able to find the org chart that she showed through some quick Googling). Betsy also stated that Defense offices were very aware of and focused on their “mission and mandate”, and that the mission of the office may determine whether they will be able to help you.

Some Defense publications are availabe through GPO – check their catalog.

Defenselink (http://www.defenselink.mil/) is an official source for timely DOD information, but it is ephemeral. Information appears on the site for a short period of time, but then disappears. It is not maintained on the site, and the site is not crawled by the Internet Archive.

“Open Source” when discussed in Defense circles doesn’t have the same meaning that librarians traditionally think of. In the Defense community, “Open Source” means information that is used by the Defense and Intelligence communities that is not created by them. Also, although they are often lumped together it is important to remember that Defense and Intelligence are separate communities, and that Defense generally operates as a “customer” of Intelligence information.

Some DoD websites that are helpful in performing research:
The Defense Technical Information Center (http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/) houses all “official” (unclassified) Department of Defense publications. It’s a good place to start looking.

*Note* Just because a document is unclassified doesn’t mean that it will be easily available. DTIC has 6 “Distribution Statements” on unclassified documents that restrict access. You can see the different statements here: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/submit/guidance/distribstatement.html

Center for Army Lessons Learned (http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/call/index.asp)
Naval Postgraduate School (http://www.nps.edu/Library/Research%20Tools/Subject%20Guides%20by%20Topic/index.html) – a good portal/topic guide
National Defense University – Military Policy Awareness Links (MiPALs) (http://merln.ndu.edu/index.cfm?type=page&pageID=3) – white papers
MERLN (http://firstsearch.oclc.org/WebZ/FSPrefs?entityjsdetect=:javascript=true:screensize=large:sessionid=fsapp5-53361-fxnl0fdv-xilutq:entitypagenum=1:0) – Group online public access catalog for the military.
Air University Library’s Index to Military Periodicals (http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/aulimp/)
Defense Libraries (http://www.dod.mil/other_info/libraries.html) – a listing of all DoD libraries, including base libraries. Betsy did mention that you should feel free to call your friendly defense librarian. If they aren’t able to help you (either because the information you seek is not publicly available, or because it is not within their mission), they will just let you know that (and refer you on if helping you is part of someone else’s mission).

Some non-DOD websites that are useful to the Defense community are:
Federation of American Scientists (http://www.fas.org/)
RAND (http://www.rand.org/)
Center for Defense Information (http://www.cdi.org)
Open Source Center (http://www.opensource.gov) – This is a government website, but not a DoD one. It can only be used by government employees and contractors.

Steve Young from the Catholic University of America then talked about Military Law. You can see his presentation handout here here.

The primary sources of military law are:
United States Constitution
Uniform Code of Military Justice (found at: 10 USC 801-946)
Manual for Courts-Law
Military Case Law
DoD Issuances
Armed Services Resolutions

The Uniform Code of Military Justice had a few precursors:
Articles of War (1775, 1776)
Lieber Code (General Order 100) (1863)
Elston Act (1948)
and finally the UCMJ in 1951

The Manual for Courts-Martial was first issues in 1895 and is amended by Executive Order.

DoD issuances can be found here.

Steven went over a lot more than I mentioned about and it was really interesting. I definitely recommend taking a look at the handout.

The main thing I got out of his talk though was the understanding that military law is not separate from general U.S. law, it’s is just a specific subsection within it. This was helpful to me because I had been sort of thinking of it as it’s own unique thing “outside” the law as I knew it.

Taxation Without Representation: An Overview of the D.C. Legislative Process and Research

Speakers:
Lorelie Masters, Jenner & Block LLP
Paul Strauss, U.S. “Shadow” Senator, District of Columbia
Barbara Ridley Monroe, Georgetown University Law Center

As a District resident, it was very interesting to me to learn more about the history of DC’s non-representation in Congress – and also some practical information on DC legislative and regulatory research. Lorelie Masters was the first speaker. She is an attorney at Jenner & Block and serves on the board of the DC Vote project. She mainly spoke about the injustice inherent in DC’s status – both not having voting representation in Congress and also having our laws reviewed by Congress. She was a good person to go first, because she laid out the basics of the issue and why this should be a concern to all the attendees, not just those from the District (although we did make up about half of the audience), but she didn’t really go into any specifics that would be helpful to a librarian trying to start some DC legislative or regulatory research.

Paul Strauss spoke next and went through the history of DC’s status, only the barest outline of which I was familiar with. In short:

1790-1800: Residents of the area which now comprises the District of Columbia were able to vote in Congressional and Presidential Elections. In fact, the Representative from the 3rd District of Maryland at that time lived in what is now the District of Columbia.

1801: These voting rights were taken away by the Organic Act.

1846: The Virginia portion of the District of Columbia ceded back to Virginia (this was due to a dispute over slavery in the District).

1871: The District has a Territorial Government (which would be the precursor to statehood), but Congress gets rid of this government (unclear exactly when) and DC is ruled by 3 Commissioners.

1960s: President Johnson changes that to just 1 Commissioner (who he calls Mr. Mayor). Also, in the 1960s, District Residents regain the right to vote in Presidential elections. DC is granted 3 electors. This number is tied to the number of electors for the least populous state, not to DC’s actual population.

1971: DC receives one non-voting Delegate to the House of Representatives.

1974: DC is given the right to elect its own mayor.

1977: A federal law is passed that would amend the constitution to grant DC 2 senators and 1 representative, but it is not ratify by the minimum required number of states.

1980: District residents officially vote to join the Union as a state. This is when we first started electing Shadow Senators and Representatives.
Our Delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, has 23 of the 24 privileges of a full Representative. She just cannot vote on final passage. This is important to keep in mind when doing cost/benefit analyses of any compromises that are requested with current legislation (in this Congress, the bills are S. 160 and H.R. 157) seeking to grant DC one representative with full privileges.

Barbara Ridley Monroe who is a librarian at the Georgetown University Law Center was the last to speak and she talk about the legislative and regulatory process within the District of Columbia. This would be helpful to librarians who don’t generally do this kind of research, but I didn’t take a lot of notes, because I’m familiar with the basics. The slides from her presentation are available here.

Two things that I did write down, that were helpful to me were:

The DC Register publishes both Acts and Laws (in DC these are difference things) and regulations, which I didn’t realize. I had only been looking at it for regs.

Also, the “official” DC Municipal Regs are horrendously out of date (and have been pretty much since they were first published decades ago), but there is an unofficial publication that can be used: Weil’s Code of D.C. Municipal Regulations, which is included on Lexis (DCADMN).

Day 4

8:30 AM – Arrive at work. Check email for reference requests that have arrive overnight. Respond to two such requests and then begin working on a new bills search that was requested the previous day.

9:42 AM – Send off results of new bills search.

9:52 AM – Email results of weekly DC Register search for proposed regulations. Add reminder to calendar to perform search again next week.

Continue with legislative history research that began on Wednesday. Review Senate report.

11:25 AM – Call regarding Maryland state bill. Locate bill and send on to the attorney. Follow-up call regarding legislative history for the bill. Like most states, Maryland history is scarce, but I send what I am able to find.

12:15 PM – Lunch. Turkey sandwich at my desk. Write and post yesterday’s “Day in the Life”

12:27 PM – Email request for legislative history research. Respond that I will handle, but, since the request is not urgent, finish my lunch first before completing.

1:16 PM – Notice that the text of a bill that an attorney was interested in has become available, send it on to her.

Urgent request comes in about membership on FDA Advisory Committees. All other work on hold, while I take a stab at it.

2:14 PM – After much back and forth, complete urgent request (which involved news articles and meeting transcripts).

Begin work on a DC Code request that came in at 1:47 PM. Quick call to attorney to discuss that I was finding. (She was looking for confirmation that something didn’t exist, and that was what I found as well).

Finally start on history request that came in during lunch.

2:43 PM – Send off legislative history. Quick follow-up on DC Code request, then back to the legislative history research from this morning. Now reviewing hearings.

4:00 PM – Take a break to complete and submit my time. Since it is the last (business) day of the month, I must submit all my time for billing. Print out a copy of the time report and leave it for my supervisor, along with my time sheet. Then back to hearings.

5:02 PM – Email attorney re: ongoing legislative history project. Provide Senate report and let him know that I hope to finish reviewing the hearings on Monday.

5:10 PM – My weekend starts. Head home.

Day 3

9:40 AM – Late arrival at work after dentist appointment. Send email to library staff letting them know that I am back. Check for any reference requests that have home in overnight. Received an email canceling a reference request from yesterday afternoon (the 4:29 PM request) as she has located the information that she needed. Go back to working on the legislative history of the US Code cite (the 4:04 PM request). Email on the relevant information available in USCCAN and explain that I will next review the Congressional Record Debate. Ask if the attorney would like for us to request the Senate report and hearings via Interlibrary Loan, since we don’t have them in house.

10:15 AM – Email reference request asking for a daily Congressional Record cite from 2003 be updated to a bound Congressional Record cite. (The Blue Book – which is like the Chicago Manual of Style for lawyers – requires that you cite to the bound permanent edition of the Congressional Record). I grab the relevant volume of the Congressional Record and review the debate for the given day until I find the quote. Luckily it’s relatively early in the debate!

10:49 AM – Phone call requesting the current text of the stimulus bill, which was passed yesterday. Explain that the text is not yet available, but send on the text as introduced, relevant committee reports, and those amendments that are available. Follow up call to go over how the legislative process works (and why the text won’t likely be available until next week).

11:21 AM – Email from attorney on the US Code research, requesting that we do get the Senate report and hearings via ILL. Review the Union List of Legislative Histories to see if any local firm did a history of the relevant Act (which would be much simpler than requesting all the individual documents separately). It is my lucky day – one local firm did and when I call the legislative librarian, not only are they willing to lend it, it’s one the shelf! Librarian tells me that it will be available for pick-up after 2:00 PM. Lucky me!

In the meantime, I work on reviewing the debate, as promised.

12:00 PM – Lunch in my work cafeteria. Finish reading the book I brought with me – The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers. Read two short stories in Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie.

1:00 PM – Back to reviewing Congressional Record debate.

1:45 PM – Create and print out ILL Request form for the legislative history. Request messenger service to go pick the history up.

Back to the Congressional Record!

3:44 PM – Receive email from an attorney asking why we didn’t find the linked document in a search we did for him two weeks ago. Forward on to my supervisor and ask how I should respond. Send attorney email detailing my search strategy and explaining why the document wasn’t among the results. Take the email as a humbling learning moment (there was another source that I could of checked where I likely would have found the result – but I relied on a free source instead). Sigh.

5:22 PM – Email the Congressional Debate materials that I found to the attorney. Explain that the legislative history has just arrived from the other firm and that I will review those materials tomorrow. Point out a reference to another law within the debate (saying that the language that we are interested in is in the spirit of that earlier law) and ask if he would like to see the history for that act as well.

5:25 PM – Leave work for the day and go to a Librarian Happy Hour with friends from grad school. Yay for librarian socializing!

7:30 PM – Head home for the evening.

Day 2

8:25 AM – Arrive at work. Check email for reference requests that have come in overnight – there are none! Emails start arriving about staff who are not going to make it in today (if yesterday was snow, today is ice – many school systems are closed or have late arrivals and some streets and sidewalks are quite treacherous). Absences mean that we will only have one librarian on the desk for the entire day. I email her and the reference manager to offer any assistance that I can give (ie, to take the simpler requests. I know legislative research quite well, but I don’t have much experience with case law).

Since there is no immediately pressing reference questions, I go back to entering my time.

9:20 AM – Reference request via email for some information on a particular provision in at 2003 law. I call the attorney to make sure that I understand her correctly and am searching for the right information. To search the Congressional Record debate, I used FDSys for the first time. So far I like it marginally better than GPOAccess, but it is certainly not wowing me.

10:38 AM – Urgent reference request comes in via email. I stop working on the first request and switch over to this one. The history in this case goes back to 1988, but luckily previous librarians at my firm compiled a bound legislative history of the relevant act.

11:21 AM – I send off an answer to the urgent request, and return to my first request. I finish up and send off that request right before lunch.

12:00 PM – Lunch! I eat at my desk, while reading fun, non-work things on my Reader. My lunch is interrupted by two calls – one from an attorney who is confused by the language in a state code. Figuring out what is going on with that takes about 10 minutes. The other call is a brief one from an attorney who I do a fair amount of work for asking me to stop by his office before 3 PM today. I promise that I will.

1:00 PM – I decide to take advantage of the relative quiet and clear my desk off a little (close to 20 print volumes – bound histories and Congressional Record volumes mainly – have accumulated on my desk since I last cleared it off).

1:20 PM – A follow-up email from the “urgent” request wanting to see some earlier legislation. I work on the request for the next hour or so.

2:30 PM – I go to visit the attorney that asked me to stop by. He gives me a bottle of wine as thanks for the help that I have been giving him. Wow! This is certainly not a regular occurence in law firm land, but it is definitely nice to know that your work has been helpful and appreciated.

Once back at my desk, I go back to entering my time.

3:30 PM – I am officially caught up on my time! Woo hoo! I send a few emails following-up on the Legislative SIS meeting yesterday.

4:06 PM – Email reference request regarding a US Code cite. Although the information is not needed until Friday morning, I pull up the Code section and take a look at the annotations. The enacting legislation is a public law that we do not have a compiled history for, so I take a look at what information I can find in USCCAN.

4:29 PM – Another email reference request. I check with the attorney to see when she needs the information (COB the next), then promise to work on it in the morning and return to my previous request.

5:04 PM – End of the work day. Send out an email letting library staff now that I have a dentist appointment in the morning and will be in late. Get a quick call from my manager asking about a previous request, which I give her the rundown on. Remind myself not to go straight to work in the morning!

Library Day in the Life – Day 1

I’m a day late, but I only read about this today. Still, I think 4 days will give a pretty good idea of what my work is like.

8:20 AM – Arrive at work. Review email that has come in overnight. Respond to two reference requests – one looking for CRS reports and one for some regulatory history. I used GalleryWatch to search for the CRS reports and HeinOnline; to look up the CFR section, and then the relevant notice in the Federal Register.

Sent out reminder for LLSDC’s Legislative Research SIS Lunch, which is happening today at my office. Emailed library staff here to let them know there would be “strangers” in our midst. It’s snowing here today, so there were a few cancellations.

Began working on entering my time for the past week. As a law firm employee I must “bill” the time I spend on client research.

9:47 AM – Email reference request for legislation from the past Congress. I located the relevant bills and report on Thomas and sent them on.

10:00 AM – Email reference request for the best way to locate a bill from 2005. Located bill on Thomas and sent on with instructions on how to use Thomas in the future. On reviewing my email, I notice that the attorney wanted the text of the bill as reported. Give the attorney a call to explain why that text is unfortunately not available.

10:10 AM – Email reference request to check the title for a Congressional staffer. I answer the question using the Leadership Library on the Internet and email back with the information and a brief plug for the Leadership Library, since it is accessible to anyone within the firm. Attorney then called looking for another staffer that she couldn’t find on that website. Checked print directory as well, and finally found him through a handy Google search.

10:28 AM – Respond to an email from a professional listserv looking for a Washington Post article from 1987. Since the librarian was local, I let her know that it was accessible through the DC Public Library’s databases, if she had a card.

11:02 AM – Phone call reference request looking for state legislative history. Explained that every state treats legislative history differently, and that I would likely need to call the state library to complete the request (always important to mention because sometime for various reasons attorneys don’t want any calls to be made). Find relevant Code section online and call the state’s Legislative Reference Service to inquire about the history. Attorney that I speak with explains that they don’t really have legislative history, but promises to fax me the annotated code section, as well as the most recent act amending that section.

11:20 AM – Food for my lunch arrives. Hurry upstairs to set up for the lunch – this surprisingly takes me right up to the point where lunch guests start arriving. During the lunch we discuss the update our SIS is doing on the Union List of Legislative Histories, GPO publishing (changes and frustrations mostly), and future programming that we would like to do. It is a great, productive lunch.

1:30 PM – Back at my desk. Information has arrived from the state Legislative Reference Service, as well as an email reference request, and in-person request to assist a colleague with a search.

2:37 PM – Email from another local firm asking about reports from an act in the 1950s. I send on the report numbers so that the librarian can request the appropriate serial set volumes via ILL.

3:13 PM – Draft and send two follow-up emails regarding the Union List to lunch attendees.

3:24 PM – Call from an attorney that I helped this morning about committee documents that he found online. Explained what he was seeing on the committee’s website.

Return to time entry (it takes longer than you would think) and try to help a colleague download some committee documents that were giving us both trouble.

Here and there throughout the day,when I had a few minutes, I would try to keep on top of my reader. Blogs that I find especially useful for my job include: Free Government Information, ResourceShelf, and beSpacific.

5:15 PM – Head home for the day.

Federal Regulatory Information and Where to Find It

Speaker: David M. Pritzker, Senior Attorney, GSA, Regulatory Information Service Center

This was a joint program of SLA-DGI and ALA-GODORT. The speaker was David Pritzker, who is a GSA attorney and really knows his regulatory stuff. He basically went through how the regulatory process developed, how it works today, and where to find some of the documents associated with it.

The impetus for creating the process that we know today was a Supreme Court case from the 1930s, which dealt with a broader issues, but in which the Justices wondered how any company was supposed to know about the regulations that they were supposed to follow, because there was no standard way in which those regulations were announced.

The Federal Register Act was passed in 1935, and the Federal Register began publishing the following year. Now there was a place for regulations to be made publically available, but there still was no standard rulemaking procedure. Every agency did things their own way. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 standardized this procedure and required “notice & comment rulemaking”. (This is codified at 5 USC 553). Courts and the Congress have added more requirements since this Act passed (the Paperwork Reduction Act, the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, etc.), but the basic procedure remains the same.

A good explanation of the process is the Reg Map, which Pritzker helped create.

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at OMB submits reports of proposed and final rules on all “significant” legislation. This is a result of Executive Order 12866, and OIRA is representing the Office of the President in its report. Information about current and recent OIRA reviews can be found on RegInfo.gov. There are other reporting requirements for certain rulemaking procedures as well (Environmental Impact Statement, Regulatory Flexibility Analysis, etc).

Pritzker then talked about the “Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions”. This agenda was mandated by an executive order. It is not legally binding, but is supposed to be the agencies’ best available guide for their regulatory plans. Previously the Unified Agenda was always published in the Federal Register, but now just the Regulatory Plan portion is published and the full unifed agenda is only available on RegInfo.gov. This is not a PDF, but rather access to GSA’s database, which allows for greater search capabilities. Currently this search goes back to 2003, but they are in the process of adding the historical data back to the 1980s.

Also on RegInfo.gov, there is a search for Information Collection Reviews currently underway, completed in the last 30 days or recently expired. Under the Paperwork Reduction Act, information collected from 10 or more people must be approved by OIRA. This search allows you to see that process.

Pritzker also mentioned regulations.gov, which allows for public commenting on rulemaking procedings (and also allows folks to view the comments of others, as well as other docket materials) and finally mentioned a report that was published the day before about e-rulemaking procedures. The Report is titled Achieving the Potential: The Future of Federal e-Rulemaking and it is available here.

What Was Lost, Now Is Found: Using Digital Repositories to Rebuild What Hurricane Rita Destroyed

Speaker: Rebecca Blakeley, McNeese State University

McNeese State University’s library was damaged during Hurricane Rita and approximately 13,000 documents in the Government Documents collection (which was on the top floor of the library) were lost (10,000 – including serial set volumes and other historical documents! – were thrown out by the EPA clean-up crew because of the extreme mold, those documents are simply unaccounted for. 3,000 more were salvaged, but unusable. Rebecca was able to create a spreadsheet of these titles however, before they too were ultimately tossed).

There are very dramatic photos of this damage in Rebecca’s presentation.

Amazingly (to me anyway), Rebecca has been able to find approximately 10% of the 3,000 known, lost documents in various digitization projects online. She talked about 5 different sources of digital government documents in her presentation:

• Google Books
• Internet Archive
• Open Library
• Registry of U.S. Government Publication Digitization Projects
• Project Gutenberg

I use Google Books and Internet Archive regularly in my never-ending search for Congressional Documents, particularly hearings, but Rebecca highlighted a few things about each worth noting. It is possible to create “libraries” of books in Google Books. You can then direct users to your specific collection (MSU’s is here), and users can add specific libraries to their favorites. You can also tag the books in your collection and add notes.

A similar feature is available at the Internet Archive – where you can create bookmarks for specific documents. At this time, however, there is no way to organize the bookmarks, or add tags or notes.

Rebecca mentioned that the Internet Archive is digitizing Serial Sets from 1993-4, but I wasn’t able to find them when I came back to my office, so perhaps they aren’t up there yet. I am highly in favor of the digitizing of Serial Sets though! She also mentioned that you could get an RSS feed of the materials newly added to the Internet Archive, but warned that it could be 500 or more entries a day.

I was only vaguely familiar with Open Library, and I’m still a little fuzzy on what it is. Open Library is a project of Internet Archive, but does it contain books that IA doesn’t? I have the impression that it doesn’t, but I’m not sure. All I know is, when I went to the Open Library website, and saw the announcement for Boston Public Library’s “Scan on Demand” program, I got super excited. It doesn’t look like I have to be patron of the Boston Public Library to take advantage of this either. Also, it looks like anyone can edit the records, so perhaps this is the place to include links to hearings that I find online – something I have been thinking about for weeks. Once I find a document I’ve been looking for, I really want to make it easier for other folks to find it too, and this might be a way to do it. I will definitely play around with Open Library some more.

I had briefly looked at the Registry of U.S. Gov’t Publication Digitization Projects before, but I was encouraged to take another look by this presentation. There is some great stuff in there! In particular, I was impressed by all the Congressional materials available through the Federal Reserve Board – old hearings (my constant concern), old Statistical Abstracts of the United States… Tons of great stuff!

Finally, Rebecca talked about Project Gutenberg, which has a small collection of government documents. It had never occured to me to look at Project Gutenberg for gov docs stuff, so this was great to hear about. My only real concern with Project Gutenberg is that the documents are text instead of PDF, so they don’t have the same “look” or feel quite as official. On the positive side though, that means that they are full text searchable.

Rebecca’s handouts (and some handy Google Books tips) are available here.

Gone Today, Here Tomorrow: Archiving and Preserving Born Digital Government Documents

Speakers: Molly Bragg, Internet Archive and James Jacobs, Stanford University

Molly spoke first and talked a little bit about who Internet Archive was and what they do, and then focused on Archive-It, their subscription services that allows libraries and organizations to do their own web archiving.

Molly’s slides are available on SlideShare. She highlighted several web archiving projects, that I was eager to go back to the office and play around with – Minerva at the Library of Congress and webharvest.gov, which is done by NARA. LOC is harvesting a wider range of stuff than NARA (which is good), but some of those materials are only available if you are actually at the Library of Congress. Perhaps this has something to with copyright concerns, but it’s sort of weird to have to actually go into a library to look at the archive of a web site.

The bulk of Molly’s talk was about Archive-It, which I had never looked at before. All of the collections of the libraries and organizations that subscribe to this service are available online for anyone to see and use, which is great. I played around a little this morning, and I was interested to see what people were saving. The Nebraska State Historical Society for example, is archiving the various websites of towns and counties throughout Nebraska. I can imagine what a boon to researchers this information will be some day. At the same time though, I’m a little curious about how organizations decide to add Archive-It and what value it is adding to the Internet Archive. I looked at a few of the websites that the Nebraska State Historical Society is archiving and they are also archived by the Internet Archive generally – and with broader date coverage. It seems to me that it would be most useful for the organizations to use Archive-It for pages that aren’t being saved by the Internet Archive – but perhaps that is generally the case and I just picked a bad example to play around in. There is also certainly value to have those materials organized into collections as well (which would mean researchers wouldn’t have to know the URL they were looking for).

James then spoke about his experience using Archive-It at Stanford. His slides are available here.

As a librarian in a private firm, it is unlikely that we would ever take on a web archiving project, but it was interesting to here more specifics about how Archive-It works, and I’m sure it was especially useful to those librarians in the room whose libraries may be considering those projects.

A few things about Archive-It that sounded good to me (were I to be considering the project) were that you could add Dublin Core metadata to the “seeds” (what they are calling the individual URLs to be archived), which would enable you to (potentially) add those seeds to your OPAC. (James also mentioned vufind which is an open source OPAC software that sits on top of your ILS – it adds functionality in a variety of ways, including working various forms of metadata, not just Marc records).

Also, Archive-It provides RSS feeds for individual seeds, as well as searches (and possibly other things, those were the two mentioned), which certainly makes keep track of things easier.

James also mentioned the IADeposit tag in delicious, which I have read about, but never used. Using this tag will upload documents to the Internet Archive to be saved – I should definitely start using this when I find documents that I need online. (I usually download them and save them in our document management system, but redundancy is definitely a good thing – plus the Internet Archive would make those documents available to everyone – not just the folks at my firm).

This session was packed and there were a lot of questions. One question that might be of special interest to those who weren’t able to attend was the cost and learning curve of Archive-It. Molly reiterated that Archive-It was a subscription service and gave the cost as $11k-16k (I presume, per year, but it wasn’t specified). She did also say, however, that Internet Archive was a non-profit and their mission was to archive web content, so that if you were at an institution that wanted to take on an archiving project, but that you were concerned about that cost, you should talk to them. She then said that Archive-It was meant for non-tech folks and didn’t have a steep learning curve.

Another question of particular interest to me was about the GAO legislative histories. The GAO legislative histories were purchased by Thomson West, which has been quite controversial. They are now available on Westlaw, but are a really expensive, out-of-contract module. James said that this project was still in the works – that Carl Malamud of public.resource.org was getting the scans that then they would be harvested and preserved through the LOCKSS program. This sounds great, if it happens, but I am still curious to find out how we would then be able to access this histories. Also, I fully expect that Thomson West would put up a huge fight about this, since they feel they have purchased exclusive rights to this and are surely hoping that this is a big money maker for them. I think that the histories (made up of government documents and compiled by government librarians – paid with taxpayer dollars) should never have been sold to a private company in the first place, and I hope Malamud is able to get them in the public domain. That said, I’m not holding my breath.