SaraJean Petite's Online Journal

GODORT Fall Meeting

On Friday, November 14, I attended the Government Documents Roundtable of Ohio Fall Meeting at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. For the program, four veteran documents librarians had been asked to describe how they’d used print resources to find information that would have been impossible (or extremely difficult) to find using electronic resources.

Coleen Parmer gave a presentation about the Catalog of Public Documents. According to Ms. Parmer’s presentation, it was a print dictionary catalog that covered government information from 1893 to 1940. It was searchable by “personal names, governmental authors, subject, and frequently titles.” It was published concurrently with the Catalog of Government Publications (which was published monthly), but eventually, the government stopped publishing the Catalog of Public Documents. Some libraries still have the Catalog of Public Documents in their collections, and it is good for answering historical reference questions. One of the examples Ms. Parmer gave was a patron who wanted to know how much snow fell in Pittsburgh in January 1938.

Karen Kimber gave a presentation titled “Finding Population Data in Historical Census Publications.” She gave a list of questions one needed to ask when doing historical census research:

1. Are the data available for the year you need?
   
2. What was the publication pattern for the data for the year you need?
   
3. When you’ve figured out what printed volume you need, how do you find it?
   
4. When you’ve found the right volume, how do you find the data you need?

The only online resource that can help answer these questions is the Census of Population and Housing page on the Census Bureau home page: http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/index.htm This site only covers the census of Population and Housing. However, Ms. Kimber provided a helpful handout with a bibliography of print resources. GODORT of Ohio has requested an electronic copy of this handout to post on its website.

George Kline demonstrated how he answered a question where a patron wanted to find a Congressional hearing in which a relative had testified. Mr. Kline used the print subject index, which directed him to a list of Ohio hearings, which gave him the date of the hearing, which directed him to the correct volume in the print Monthly Catalog, which gave him the SuDoc number of the hearing he wanted. (Most of those present were aware that Lexis has a new product that will enable users to answer the question posed by Mr. Kline’s patron. However, that product is extremely expensive, and not all libraries would be able to afford it.)

Audrey Hall gave an overview of the CIS microfiche collection at the State Library of Ohio. She discussed its coverage and indexing for Congressional Committee Prints, Senate Unpublished Hearings, House Unpublished Hearings, U.S. Congressional Committee Hearings, Publication of the United States Congress, and Executive Branch Documents.