Resource of the Week: Government Information Clearinghouse & Handout Exchange
Resource of the Week: Government Information Clearinghouse & Handout Exchange
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
As I’m sure you realize, we are huge fans of librarian-created resources here at RT. After all, information professionals have been adding value to the Internet since back in the days when you had to connect with Dixie cups and string. We also love resources that can save us time and effort.
So when our friends over at the Free Government Information blog alerted us to the Government Information Clearinghouse & Handout Exchange, from the ALA Government Documents Round Table, we clicked on over to have a look. We liked what we saw. FGI-maven Daniel Cornwall, of the Alaska State Library, provided a quick tour in a recent blog post:
Government Information librarians have acquired a lot of expertise. We’ve written a lot of guides and pathfinders to government information.
The Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) of ALA has been collecting these handouts for years so we docs librarians wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we needed to create a handout or give someone a starting point for research. Recently, this GODORT “Handout Exchange” has been wikified at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Exchange.
The Handout Exchange is divided into four areas:
Doug informs us that the coordinator for the Clearinghouse project is Jennie Burroughs, government documents librarian at the Montana State University Library. Note that she makes a number of library instructional guides available via her web page. An unusual one that caught our eye: Government Documents for Anthropologists (PDF; 60 KB).
The Clearinghouse is searchable (via a Google custom search). And contributions are welcome if you have handouts/guides/tutorials of your own to share.
FGI, meanwhile, is starting a new Guide of the Week column, in which a different resource from this collection will be highlighted on a weekly basis. The first week’s pick is Afro-Americans and the Military — 1939 to 1945, from Denise Schoene, at the University of Michigan Library Documents Center — long one of our favorite fishing holes here on ResourceShelf.