LAST DAY!!!

Today is my last day as a government documents intern. I got my evaluation from Lou, and I thought that it was a very fair assesment of my abilities and areas that I need to work on. It's funny that the areas that I am always worried about are not always what my supervisors are worried about; for example, I worry about my reliability, but they never do. I don't know WHY I do, but I do. Maybe I"m afraid of becoming unreliable someday and so I worry about it.

Anyway, I need to work on decision making skills, attention to detail, ability to select the best resources for a question, ability to organize & classify info best, and professionalism. But it's not like I failed those areas, I just didn't get "excellent"--just good. And those are all areas that I think any intern should expect to have to work on. Also, I think that given more time here, several of those areas could have been improved.

At least I wasn't ever scored as "dull" like SLIS interns of olden days--before they changed the grading sheet, an intern's intelligence was marked on a scale from "sharp" to "dull" or something equally non-PC. But funny.

I feel like I have learned a lot about gov docs overall, especially searching the databases. Also, answering reference questions. I admit I didn't start out with a lot of enthusiasm for it, but towards the end, as I gained confidence in my skills I also gain enthusiasm for the job. Nobody likes to do what they're bad at, I guess.

I will kind of miss this place--it was one of the best library experiences I've had thus far. Well, the clock says 12:00, and I have a paper to turn in downstairs, so off I go into the next phase of life. Good luck, myself.

Mon. Apr. 25

Winding down...Lou said I will be done on Friday. I don't know exactly why I"m still blogging here except for completeness. Turns out that my citation poster project served me well because a student came in needing a lot of help with his final paper citations. He had a lot of secondary sources and weird no-author situations and electronic sources, etc., which I didn't feel 100% comfortable with, but I also feel like I gave him good information, which I probably couldn't have said two months ago.

I suppose Friday I should reflect on what I've learned this semester, at least as far as government documents go.

For future reference:

The government is going to unveil a new nutritional pyramid soon. This salon article talks about it and the accompanying website that looks pretty neat.

Mon. Apr. 18

Even though I've already turned in this blog, I thought I'd go ahead and update anyway. I am adding more questions to my "Knowledge Base" although I wonder if they will really be used at some point. Today I had a couple of hard reference questions: one about a GAO report on value-added taxes from 1989, which I couldn't find, and another about a desegregation plan from Maryland, which I think I found, but I wasn't sure. Other than that, it is quiet. My co-workers tell me that the end of the semester is usually s-l-o-w because everyone's already done their term papers and is studying and professors are grading/whatever.

the poster

To Do Next Week

Tuesday April 19: Email Ralf your blog & abstracts.

Thursday April 21: 2:30-3:45, room 049A. Presentation.

Your oral report should be about 5 to 7 minutes and present the
highlights of your internship experience:
Where did you work?
Who was/were your supervisor/s?
What were your primary responsibilities?
What do you consider your major accomplishments/or what did you
learn from the experience?

Abstract #6

Block, M. (2003). Dealing with digital. Library Journal 128(12). Accessed April 12, 2005 from Library Lit & Inf Full Text.

Examines the roles and positions of government documents librarians at two midwestern unversities. Emphasis was placed on their unique service orientation as well as their unique and wide-ranging collections. These librarians not only have their public service duties (reporting not only to their home institution but in a major sense to the government at large) but also their academic and collection development duties. For these librarians, digitization will have both positive and negative consequences. It is positive that citizens will have greater access than before (theoretically), but questions still remain as to who will store all these digital files and how they can be searched. "The more power the government has, the more essential it is that it be held accountable for its actions. Information is the sunlight that exposes slimy crawling things like incompetence and corruption and sends them running for cover. And, most importantly, the mission of depository librarians is to provide that sun."

Abstract #5

Drake, M.A. (2005).Federal Depository Library Program: Safety Net for Access. Searcher13(1) p. 46-50. Accessed April 10, 2005 via Library Lit & Inf Full Text.

An overview of the federal depository library program, including its history (from Jefferson's belief in an informed citizenship) to Congress's 1813 decision to print one copy of everything for its citizens. The author mentions the program funding, including the costs borne by local libraries (such as IU) that chose to remain depository libraries. Projects for the future of the FDLP include a massive digitization project that will eventually end in the collection of last resort. In this scenario, everything the government publishes will go straight to digital format and straight to the hands of the citizens. Several "light" or usable archives will remain open to the public, and at least one "dark", unused, archive will act as a musuem to retain items for the historical record.

Abstract #4

No author. (2005). Secrecy report card: an update. Openthegovernment.org, April 5, 2005. Accessed April 12, 2005 from http://www.openthegovernment.org.

According to this article, 2004 was the most secretive year yet for the US government. Fewer classified documents were released to the public (10% more than in previous years) while more documents were made classified and for a longer period of time. While no one wants government secrets to cause possible security breeches, OpenTheGovernment is concerned that citizens who need to acquire information for their own safety will not be able to do so.

Abstract #3

Ren, W. (1999). US government information need, awareness, and searching: a study of small business executives. Journal of Government Information 26(5), p. 453-465.

Literature was examined and the author determined that a major group of government information users yet to be studied is small business owners. The author sent out surveys to New Jersey business owners to determine their need for government information, their awareness of its availabilty (and its formats), and to what extent demographics played into information searching. Results showed that the main factors affecting searching were business competitiveness, age of business owners, and Internet access.

Abstract #2

Garvin, P. (2005). The government domain: why Google Uncle Sam? Law Library Research Xchange. Accessed March 4, 2005 from http://www.llrx.com/columns/govdomain2.htm.

This article is a comparison between two government search facilities, Google Uncle Sam and FirstGov. The author first runs through the pros and cons of the functionalities of each. Uncle Sam has the noted capabilities of Google behind it--especially their ranking system. However, they only search .gov and .mil websites, ignoring those government sites with .edu or .com endings. Also, there is no way to filter out the mass of state government entries. FirstGov has more advanced search functions, such as picking the document format or the specific domain (omitting things such as the 50 state websites). However, it doesn't have the power of Google behind it (or the ranking system). The author conducted comparison searches and found that while Google's ranking system returned more recent results, FirstGov responded with more relevant results overall. Her overall advice is to use both, or if possible, more than these two. Also, she recommends to use FirstGov's directories and other indexed resources.

Mon. Apr. 11

Today I worked on putting the new citations onto the poster. In effect, I changed the entire thing around. But, I think it is good now. The end result is a poster that is focused just on MLA format. Besides some microforms questions, the only reference question I had today was about a treaty passed during the 102nd Congress having to do with the environment in Antarctica. Turns out it was introduced by none other than Sen. John Kerry. I find that the one thing I have to work on is recognizing SuDoc vs. LC numbers and where those materials are in the collection. I seem to always be looking in the wrong place first.

Friday Apr. 8

Lou informed me of some problems with the citations I put on my poster. So I spent the morning looking through the MLA handbook and finding new docs to put on the poster, after all. It took the whole three hours to accomplish. No reference questions today, either.

Monday April 4

I finally finished the citation poster after re-arranging the text and adding some more stuff to it, etc. I hope to post a PDF image of it on here perhaps on friday. I'm actually kind of proud of it, even though some of the citations are questionable. But, I have to reassure myself that it can't be helped--there really aren't standards out there for many government documents, most notably anything that NARA has in its Declassified Documents collection. I'm still not sure how to cite that, or if it even should have been used as an example, but that's neither here nor there at this point. On Friday I hope to add three more questions to the KB stuff and work on that for awhile, since that is technically my semester project. Even though I've been working on other stuff...I do need a "deliverable" by the end of this internship so I can prove that I really did something after all. Only a couple more weeks to go!

Busy Day

Been a lot of questions this morning in gov docs... microforms, finding things in the stacks for people, quick reference questions, and, of course, the citation poster. Apparently, the APA doesn't care about documents that come off of microforms, because they don't even include a section about it in their main reference text. The poster is coming along nicely. Although, I need to get re-started on my knowledge base questions because that is my main project and I feel like it can be expanded more. The poster, though, is looking nice, IMHO.

Yesterday: sent in my (tardy) half-way mark update to Ralf. also scheduled a time to do my presentation. h00ray.