Almost every day the federal government is in the news, and quite often the coverage is front page news that can impact our lives in many ways. This session will delve into the full range of Congressional information resources, from the earliest reports of American expeditions around the world to the latest information on Congressional “pork barrel” expenditures and how members of our Vermont Congressional delegation have voted on various issues. A future session will be devoted to information resources from various agencies within the Executive branch of the federal government.

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“Liaison Discussion Sections” address topics of interest to liaisons: research and/or technology. They can be conversations, or presentations, or both. They will take place most often on the 3rd week of the month, but in order to allow people who work different hours to attend, they’ll occasionally be scheduled for different days/times.

I’m therefore pleased to announce that the name for this area is now Research and Collection Services (RCS). While many portions of the website still reflect the old names — and it will take a while before we’ve eradicated all remnants of Collection Management/Academic Consulting Services from the website, email distribution lists, HR/Banner information, etc. — please consider the name to be effective immediately.  We’ll try to get the changes made expeditiously.

As a reminder, RCS includes:

• Reference and Instruction Librarians
• Special Collections
• Vt. Collection
• Government Documents
• Inter-library Loan
• Cataloging/Acquisitions/Serials
• Preservation & Processing
• Collection Development

Implementation (Dec. 10 to 20): Which Federal agencies are good
candidates to adopt Public Access policies? What variables (field of
science, proportion of research funded by public or private entities,
etc.) should affect how public access is implemented at various
agencies, including the maximum length of time between publication and
public release?

Features and Technology (Dec. 21 to Dec 31): In what format should the
data be submitted in order to make it easy to search and retrieve
information, and to make it easy for others to link to it? Are there
existing digital standards for archiving and interoperability to
maximize public benefit? How are these anticipated to change.

Management (Jan. 1 to Jan. 7): What are the best mechanisms to ensure
compliance? What would be the best metrics of success? What are the
best examples of usability in the private sector (both domestic and
international)? Should those who access papers be given the
opportunity to comment or provide feedback?

Please do comment at the OSTP site (you’ll need to register first).

http://blog.ostp.gov/wp-login.php?action=register

We have tax forms available. Paper forms can be found at the display area at the Information desk. The tax forms on cd can be found in the Government Documents CD collection under call number T 22.51/4:. The forms can also be obtained online at: http://www.irs.gov/formspubs/index.html.

The Vermont State Data Center sponsored a workshop to discuss and review some websites and the upcoming 2010 Census. The State Data Center (SDC) Program is a cooperative program between the state and the Census Bureau to make data available locally to the public through a network of state agencies, universities, libraries, and regional and local governments.

In early December the State Data gathered together a group of statistical users to talk about the upcoming 2010 Census. At the present time the Census Bureau is gearing up by hiring individuals to check addresses and to work in the Vermont office which is located in the Burlington area. They are also looking for community volunteers and groups to help with making sure that the count is complete. I have posted some literature in the staff room about Census 2010.

One significant difference in the 2010 Census will be that there will be no long forms handed out. The information that was gathered in the long form then is now being gathered by the American Community Survey (ACS) (http://www.census.gov/acs/www/).  The ACS is a department of the Census Bureau that surveys the population on an ongoing basis to provide more recent information than is available from our Decennial Census. This method of gathering information is going to be problematic for small states like Vermont. The surveys used to get the sample information are sent out to certain parts of each state each month in a rotation. In small states the sampling area is so small that the information has to be gathered for a longer period of time in order to get enough samples so that the people answering the questions can’t be identified. The effect for small states is that the statistics that they use will only be available every 5 years, while larger states will have new statistics every year. When applying for grants, larger states will have an edge because their statistics will be more up to date than the smaller states.

Our State Data Center has been in contact with the Census Bureau to try and work out this problem. The director of the Vermont State Data Center, Will Sawyer, had a personal meeting with the head of the Census Bureau. Although nothing is scheduled to change immediately the Census Bureau is considering the problem and potential fixes.

We also reviewed how to use American Fact Finder and the State Data Center’s website, Vermont Indicators. Vermont Indicators is very useful for finding compiled statistics for the state. They also have historic data which can be easily accessed by the click of button. Vermont Indicators can be found at http://maps.vcgi.org/indicators/.