Cutting Through the Red Tape of Government Information

Government has long been associated with red tape. Anyone who has ever completed any government form understands this. Getting access to government information can be just as difficult, especially if you don’t know where to look for information. Sometimes even if you know where to find the information it may not be accessible electronically.                                                 

I had a personal experience recently with such a situation. One of my daughters, is a policy analyst at a non-profit organization in Washington D.C. Occasionally, she will call her mother, the librarian, when she can’t find information she needs on her own. A couple of weeks ago, she needed a Congressional Roll Call vote from 1970. We both knew the logical places to find this information: the Congressional Record and Thomas (at the Library of Congress).  I have access to Lexis Nexis Congressional and none of these sources had the information electronically. She eventually ended up finding the information through another source. The point is that even experienced searchers may encounter difficulties finding government information.

Many of the resources available by the government, particularly the federal government, are not easily found. It was for this reason, I felt it was important for me to take Government Information as an MLS student; not only was this class a valuable part of my education, I found that for an information geek, government websites are filled with fascinating facts and information.

As someone who is interested in government libraries and information, I keep my eye out for information on government websites and new government resources. Recently, this has paid off. I have come across a couple of new sources which will be of great use at a future point in time.

The first is Metalib which is a federated search engine of  just over 50 different federal government agencies.  A user can type in a search term and search all agencies at the same time and then receive results by the agency which has information related to the search. Metalib offers users both a basic, advanced and expert  search options.  The basic search will search a term or set of terms. The advance search allows the user to define the fields for searching and predefined subject areas. The expert gives the user much greater control in defining the search by having the ability to select both an agency and then subgroups within that agency. Another feature of this search engine is the ability to save their searches and the results. Even though users are able to save results to “My EShelf” the results are only saved for the current session and cannot be saved for future retrieval. Despite this drawback, this is an excellent resource for accessing government information.

One of my favorite blogs is the  Resource Shelf Blog. I have found some excellent resources through this blog including Metalib. Sometimes the stated purpose of a website or resource may  cause it to be overlooked, when the user is not interested in the specified subject matter. The Policy Agendas Project is such an example. I found this website through the  Resource Shelf Blog.  This site was created at the University of Texas at Austin through a grant from the National Science Foundation to track public policy changes during the 20th century. Of the many resources provided through this web site is an Excel spreadsheet of Roll Call Votes since 1933, a resource I could have used a few weeks ago.

As I previously mentioned, trying to find government information can be difficult, but there is good news in federal government information.  The government has embraced the use of social media tools. Many government agencies have a presence on Facebook, You Tube, Twitter and Flickr.  The use of these tools provide the federal government with the means to deliver information to the public instantaneously and conversely, get immediate feedback on that information.

The power of the federal government’s use of social networking was dramatically illustrated when the Library of Congress launched their Flickr site in 2008. The following passage is from a research paper I wrote for Government Information Resources class in August, “Flickr Commons was launched on January 16, 2008, with little fanfare. There was no press release, the pilot was mentioned on the Library of Congress blog: http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2008/01/my-friend-flickr-a-match-made-in-photo-heaven/ and Flickr’s blog: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2008/01/16/many-hands-make-light-work/. Any concern either had about the success of the Commons was immediately put to rest. It only took 24 hours for the realization that this partnership was an astounding success. On the first day Flickr reported the Library of Congress account had 1.1 million views,  then 3.6 million views within the first week and 1.9 million total visits. (Library of Congress, 2008, pg.14) The decision not promote this new project obviously did not impact the future success of the program. A review of the traffic on the LC photostream has shown 82% of the traffic came from within Flickr, only 3% came from search engines (Library of Congress, 2008, pg.14) The blogosphere played a tremendous role in the initial success of the Commons, the program was mentioned in more than 1600 blogs during the first week, which, in turn grabbed the attention of the mainstream media .

 The government goes to great lengths to provide information to the public; however,  finding the information is not always easy and sometimes requires the assistance of a skilled librarian or researcher, to at the very least, point an information seeker in the right direction. While the federal government is making some progress making access to information more intuitive, it is up to librarians to help cut throught the red tape.