UA’s Government Documents Librarian Blogs in the Public Interest

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Government documents have a tremendous amount of information buried in them, and Valerie Glenn and other librarians at The University of Alabama hold the shovel.

“Most people don’t understand how much good information is out there that’s produced by the government,” said Glenn, government documents librarian at UA’s University Libraries. “A lot of it is available online; you just have to dig through it to find it.”

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Valerie Glenn

Glenn is helping the University community and the general public with a blog linking to government documents. The timely bulletins Glenn posts key off the news, holidays and other events. Sometimes a newspaper article will mention information from the government; to help readers go further, Glenn will unearth the document or press release undergirding the story.

“Usually if you’re trying to track down an actual report, you can expect some information to be in a newspaper article, like the agency that published it,” she said. “But sometimes just going to the Web site and looking at press releases is easier than doing a keyword search for it.”

She also blogs about information of general interest to the public. She recently blogged about holiday safety for July 4. Other recent posts include information on the George W. Bush archives, Environmental Protection Agency data and the wild turkey in Alabama.

Glenn discovers topics for the blog by keeping up with the national and local news, and she subscribes to RSS feeds produced by the state of Alabama.

UA Libraries have a particular responsibility when it comes to the public: As a Federal Depository Library, government documents are stored at UA and are open to the public. Recently, the Federal Depository Library Program featured UA – and Glenn’s blog — in an article on its Desktop Web site.

“We agree to serve the citizens of the congressional district,” Glenn said. “We try to go beyond the university community to see what would be of interest to the public.”

To uncover the information people need, Glenn says, the digger needs to know how government functions. Agencies’ interests and data-gathering often overlap.

“It really helps to know the way government works,” she said. “You can find information on just about anything in the government documents collection, but you can’t necessarily say the Department of Agriculture is just going to publish on food or farming. Plus, Congress is a special category in terms of government information, because it almost seems that everything is in its purview. So it definitely helps to know how government works.”

In addition to the blog, Glenn is active in the Government Documents Round Table of the American Library Association and co-editor of the roundtable’s DttP: Documents to the People publication. She and the rest of the staff at UA Libraries are prepared to help patrons find what they need in government documents.

“Everyone on the reference desk should be able to get people started on government information,” she said. “We’re always willing to help.”

Contact

Valerie Glenn, 205/348-4971 or vglenn@ua.edu; Richard LeComte 205/348-3782, rllecomte@ur.ua.edu.