 Thank you, Linda. Welcome, everyone. This is the first in a series of sessions on government information brought to you by the North Carolina Library Association Government Resources section. Today's session will lay the groundwork for future sessions, which will include genealogical research using government resources, legal materials, military history, business resources, and some others still in the planning stages. My name is Bryna Coonan, and I have been rattling around reference and documents departments for many years, first at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and then at the University of Georgia, later at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and finally here at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. I understand we have a number of folks joining us from outside of North Carolina, and we want to welcome you especially. We have just a couple of mentions of North Carolina-specific material sprinkled into today's festivities, so statehood or even nationhood should not be a factor. All right. Why are we here? The situation will be familiar to many of you. We are all doing more with less. Sometimes we are repurposing staff, reassigning staff to areas and duties where they have not worked before, or for which resources for training may not be available. We may have had someone with us with expertise in government information, but that person has moved on, or we never had someone to start with. At the same time, more government information is freely available and visible, so the expectation that we can find these materials is pretty high. We also have tight budgets for materials, and you've already paid for this material that the government has produced, so this is a way of increasing your collection that you've actually already paid for. There's no reason to fear here. This is not a mystery. It just takes some time, thought, and a little patience. Here's what we'll cover. The reference process and how government information fits into that process, where government information comes from, because knowing that helps you build a structure in your mind to help you organize your knowledge of government information as it develops, as you learn. We'll concentrate on freely available tools to access government information. If you're working in a library that can afford subscription tools such as Lexus-Nexus Congressional, that's a wonderful help to have, but most libraries cannot afford to have these, so we want to concentrate on what you can do without a subscription. Lastly, we'll cover how to learn more, how to independently, at your own pace, build on what we learned today, and we'll want to make sure you have a strategy for getting more help if you do get an abide. By the end of our presentation, we expect you'll have a little better grasp of the structure of the federal government, the main types of publications produced, some strategies for finding government information, and again, that you can take it from here. Learning more about government information on your own, and in a pinch, getting help when you need it. Reference is not magic. While it may at times resemble chaos, it is actually a process. Not that serendipity plays no part, but there really is a process involved. First, do a good reference interview. That doesn't change just because government information is involved. Remain approachable to your users, whether in person or communicating electronically. Clarify the question as best you can using open questions. Say your patron asks where your law stuff is, your legal materials. Do you know enough yet to direct the user? You don't really, not just yet. Are they looking for federal laws, state laws, or perhaps they or a member of their family is thinking of going to law school or getting a divorce? You might respond in this way to help clarify. We have a lot of law resources. If you can tell me a bit more about what you need, I can be of better help to you. Or perhaps a patron outraged at some recent current event asks, who is my congressman pounding on the table? Do you know yet at this point in the reference transaction whether the patron is asking for a state senator or their member of the House of Representatives in Washington? And depending on the source of their outrage, it may actually be the mayor of your town that's really the person they should contact. So conduct that interview without badgering until you know a little more. It makes for a more efficient and better quality interaction. Nothing takes the place of knowledge, and that's what you're building by joining us today. So be patient with yourself. You'll never know everything or remember everything. This is an ongoing learning activity, and you will get better at it as you go along. Lastly, most reference questions actually fall into one of two major categories, topical questions and known item questions. And that has some relevance for our government documents work. Topical questions are ones that could benefit from using government information, but you do not have a specific document or publication in mind. Say a patron is interested in the subject of elder abuse. That's a good example of a topical information need. A known item query is one where you have a specific target item to find. You know it exists. You know exactly what it is. The techniques and tools for finding topical items and known items differ a bit when searching for reference information generally, and the same is true when looking for government information. So keep this in mind, and we'll see it play out as we go along. Where does government information come from? It issues forth from the three branches of government, legislative, judicial, and executive, plus some additional agencies and departments like the Department of Energy or National Science Foundation, for example. It also comes from commissions like the Federal Trade Commission and government corporations. You will remember Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. For many years, government information was largely organized and distributed through the Federal Depository Library Program, the FDELP. What should you expect when working with government information? Well, you will need some tolerance for broken links and redirects. Be aware that freely available government information websites rarely provide a deep archive at this time. We're still in a transition period with regard to the archives. Organization of the federal government. This is important. The legislative branch is responsible for making the laws. So we elect members of Congress. They make the laws that govern us. The judicial branch contains the courts. When laws are broken, the judicial branch is involved. The executive branch contains the president, but also the agencies and departments within the federal government. Department of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Homeland Security, and so on. Note there's a common misconception. Justice is a department, and if such is found under the executive branch, let me mark that for you, in the executive branch, not the judicial branch. See, it follows from the executive branch. So be sure not to confuse them. It sounds like it should be under judicial, but it isn't. The state of North Carolina has a similar structure. We have the General Assembly with the House and Senate for our legislative branch. This consists of our elected representatives who make our laws. Our judicial branch gets involved when we break the laws of North Carolina, and our departments and agencies come under our top executive, our governor. All right, and today we're going to have several instances of what I'll call don't miss. We'll see a number of items that we've designated as don't misses. Standard established sources that if you can get familiar with them, will take you a long way toward a solid knowledge of government information. The U.S. Government Manual is one of these. In one place, you'll find consistent and comprehensive information on the three branches of government, complete with contacts, statements of purpose, description, and a brief history. Yep, you can piece together a lot of this from various websites, but the U.S. Government Manual can save you a lot of time by gathering all of the information in one handy spot. A little background, just a little. The government printing office, the GPO, publishes information produced by and for the federal government. That's a lot of stuff. And in fact, the GPO is the largest publisher in the world. The head of the government printing office, also called the public printer, selects someone to serve as the superintendent of documents. The superintendent of documents job is to actually disseminate the information that GPO has produced for us. This is organized by Sudak's number. Government information, whether in print or electronically, is organized by the governmental body or agency that produces it. In many of our libraries, we use Dewey classification or LC class. In these, you can browse for items by call number and expect to find items on a similar subject grouped together within those numbers. But not so in the world of government information. The organizing principle in government info is the body that produced the information. And the superintendent of documents, sometimes called Sudak's number, is the government information call number. Let's take just a quick look at this. Sudak's numbers begin with the letters A through T that usually identify the executive department or agency that publishes the document. So a number that starts with A93 is a pub produced by the Department of Agriculture. A pub that has a Sudak's number beginning with S, such as S1, would be from the Department of State. By the way, agencies have changed names over time. So very old publications from the Department of State will have a Sudak's number beginning with FS for Foreign Service. Well, the exception to the rule. Here's an important exception. The letters X and Y identify documents pertaining to Congress, such as congressional hearings and reports. An example is the Sudak's number you see here. Y4 denotes congressional hearing. In this case, it's a hearing on the legal rights of Guantanamo detainees. We won't have time to look at committee materials, but those are called Y1s, committee reports and committee prints. So if you want to sound cool and sound like you know a lot and you're around government documents people, throw around a few Y4s and Y1s. Because this hearing is available electronically, it also has a persistent URL or a pearl. Congressional hearings. Once a bill is introduced, it's often sent to committee for study and consideration. The Y4s for congressional hearings represent testimony before these committees and the subcommittees of Congress. So hearings can cover proposed legislation. This is very common. They can be conducted as research for future legislation. Hearings may also be conducted when there's a question of whether the president has overstepped his or her power. This is an example of oversight of the executive office. For example, President Clinton pardoned commodities trader Mark Rich, who was accused at that time of evading $48 million in taxes and illegally trading with Iran during the hostage crisis. A congressional hearing was held to determine whether this was a misuse of presidential power. In more recent history, there was a movement to conduct congressional hearings to probe whether U.S. intelligence was accurate concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to ultimately determine whether the president was justified in sending troops to that country. You'll also find in hearings nominations to high office Supreme Court nominees, for example. And as ever, budget and appropriation issues will take a lot of congressional time. So who testifies at these things? Well, experts on a subject. I've used this to help patrons or members of an organization looking for speakers for experts. Lobbyists, of course, testify. Members of the executive branch, when they testify, they're usually summoned. They don't usually stop by on their own. Recently, for example, Secretary of Defense Gates testified before Congress concerning the budget for the Defense Department. The members of the public may also be called to testify, even movie stars. Picture here is actor Richard Gere testifying in 2002 before a congressional committee concerning human rights issues, urging the United States to support the Dalai Lama in his effort to resolve the issue of Tibet through dialogue with Chinese leadership. Somewhat less commonly, other members of Congress may also be called to testify. In 2008, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia testified at a Senate committee on Indian affairs hearing to push for passage of legislation to federally recognize six of Virginia's Indian tribes. There are a number of ways to find hearings, and we'll discuss one of those, USA.gov, later on in our presentation. Let's recap. Legislative means Congress, laws are made, judicial is the courts, the laws are allegedly broken, and executive is the president and the departments and agencies, laws are implemented and enforced. Legislative branch congressional, both the Senate and the House have their own websites, and they're a great place to find contacts, biographies of members of Congress, information about voting records for the senator or representatives, what committees they're on, some nice photos, etc. Here's our second Don't Miss of the day. Thomas was created by the Library of Congress. It has improved a great deal over time with respect to content. It includes the texts of bills introduced, resolutions, like House Resolution 22 and the current Congress, resolving to reduce the amount authorized for salaries and expenses of members in 2011 and 2012. You can also see what's happening with a bill as it moves through the lawmaking process through various committees, and when it's finally brought to a vote, see the roll call vote for that bill. This seems very esoteric, but it's actually very simple and very important. Bills are numbered sequentially as they are introduced, HR1, HR2 from the House, S1, S2 from the Senate. The sequence begins all over again with the next Congress. The bill number is unique only through the sessions of the Congress in which it was introduced. So if you have a number like HR2314 and you have no year or Congress associated with, you do not yet have enough information to locate it. Once passed and signed by the President, a bill becomes a law and it gets a public law number. In this case, we have public law number 109-358, and the 109 refers to the 109th Congress. The bill is published in the Statutes at Large in order of the date it's enacted. Our example is 120 Statutes at Large number 2048. In this case, the 120 refers to the volume of the Statutes at Large, not to a Congress. That can be confusing because they are often very close to the number of the Congress, but it's a volume and not a Congress number. Both the public law number and the Statutes at Large numbers remain unique for that law. So the bill numbers are not unique. You have to have the Congress of the Year, but the public law and Statutes at Large numbers are unique. Let's recap for just a second because it's important. Bill numbers like HR1, S2 are unique only to their Congress. Public law numbers and Statutes at Large numbers are unique to that law and remain so in perpetuity. Knowing this can save you a lot of grief when you're working with congressional materials. The U.S. Code. A bill becomes a law. It gets its public law number and its Statutes at Large number. These are chronological numbers assigned at the time the bill becomes a law. But the next important thing that happens is that the laws get codified by subject in the U.S. Code. So if you're looking for current federal laws in force concerning child pornography, you cannot comb through all the laws passed in various Congresses over many years. You'll want to go to the most recent edition of the U.S. Code. Here is 18 U.S. Codes section 2251 refers to title 18 of the U.S. Code section 2251. Don't miss number three. You can find the U.S. Code available in a variety of resources. But here you'll see two that are stable and freely available. FDCIS, the Federal Digital System, we'll see again in just a moment. It was formally known as GPO Access and it's maintained by the government printing office to provide free online access to official federal government publications. The development of FDCIS is still ongoing. Thomas we saw earlier from the Library of Congress. Lots of times, let me get you to the next slide here, lots of times we hear laws referred to as acts of Congress and for simplicity we come to know them by their popular name rather than by their long official name. The Clean Water Act is actually the Federal Water Pollution Control Act. The Glass-Steagall Act is actually the Banking Act of 1933. What we refer to as the Original Hate Crimes Act is actually the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. So sometimes we just need the official name of an act to search an official source. That's when acts by popular names can help. And here are three places you can freely go to decode these if you need to. If you ever watch C-SPAN you are seeing the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress live. The official printed record of these is the Congressional Record. The Congressional Record has a long and fascinating history. For example, eulogies for many well-known and lesser-known individuals are recorded in the Congressional Record. We won't have time today to explore the rich history of the Congressional Record, but it's worth a session all of its own. You can use both FDCIS and Thomas to locate items in the Congressional Record, although here is an instance of where free online access means you will not yet have a deep archive available. At this time FDCIS only takes you back to about 1994. Thomas goes back only to the mid-1980s. And there are some individual digitizing projects going on, and the problem of free access to all of the Congressional Record searchable in one free spot will eventually be solved. But right now for comprehensive readily searchable access to the Congressional Record for free, excuse me, you'll need access to a paid subscription to something like LexisNexis Congressional. You won't be able to do it completely for free. Congress has its own research arm, Congressional Research Service, the CRS, researchers who gather information for congressmen and congresswomen to use in their own deliberations. Congress needs the best of the best, top-notch research, and they get it, paid for with your tax dollars. But they do not readily distribute it after they use it. Fortunately, there are ways to get the CRS reports. You can request individual CRS reports from your congressperson, but this is cumbersome and inconvenient, and it can take several weeks to receive the report you need. You may have to go that route for some reports, but first try these two free websites that help you get electronic access to many CRS reports. These are put together by organizations that have already requested reports from congresspeople, and they mount them for us. Here's an example of a CRS report on alternative fuels and advanced technology vehicles. You and your patrons have paid for them as taxpayers, so you'll want to make them available to your users when appropriate to a question that they bring to you. Judicial. On to the judicial branch. Anyone here watch Law and Order reruns that you do? I do. That show is a great way to help with the confusion we noted earlier when we were looking at the chart of the structure of the government. One part of Law and Order involves the police, law enforcement, ultimately under the Department of Justice, which we saw as part of the executive branch. The second half of Law and Order episodes involve the courts, the judicial system, the judicial branch. Our judicial system rests upon the notion of stare decisis, stare decisis, to stand by decisions. That means that judges are obliged to respect the precedents established by prior decisions. The Supreme Court is our highest court. A case that reaches the Supreme Court has usually, though not always, gone through a number of lower courts, such as district courts or other courts of appeal. The supremecourt.gov site contains biographies of current justices and Supreme Court opinions for the last five years or so. Cases decided by the Supreme Court are collected in a publication called the U.S. Reports. So the title of the publication that contains all the Supreme Court opinions does not have the word Supreme Court in it. This is one thing you just have to remember. Here we see a typical site to a Supreme Court opinion. It's read as Bayes v. Reese. It's volume 553 of the U.S. reports, and the case starts on page 35. Here's Ms. Number 4. Sometimes freely available legal materials from the government are not always available or easy to use. Here are two non-government resources that are more user-friendly for us to use instead. Cornell Law is helpful for more academic uses. NOLO is especially helpful when you need to refer a patron for more consumer-related or personal law issues. In some ways, the executive branch is the least familiar to us. We are well aware of the president, but usually not so aware of the publications the president is responsible for creating, and we're often less aware generally of the departments and agencies that make up a huge chunk of the executive branch. The president can issue executive orders. These have the force of law, but they do not travel through Congress, so sometimes presidents do get criticized for issuing them. Executive Order 9981 issued by Harry Truman in 1948 desegregated the armed forces of the United States. The president can use an executive order to create a national holiday or a day designated to a special event. Take Your Child to Work Day was created by executive order. Following the earthquake in Haiti, President Obama issued Executive Order 13529 ordering selected reserve and certain individual-ready reserve members of the armed forces to active duty to assist in Haitian earthquake relief efforts. The weekly compilation of presidential documents is published every Monday, and it's the official publication of presidential statements, messages, remarks, and other materials released by the White House press secretary. As you might imagine, the public papers of the presidents have great significance for historical research. The National Archives website helps us keep track of executive orders, including the most recent ones. Our by now old friend, F.B. Siss, houses for us the weekly and daily compilations of presidential documents. F.B. Siss does not have the papers of the presidents, I'm sorry, does have some of the papers of the presidents, but not all of them. So for now, we depend on a wonderful and interesting nongovernmental website created at the University of California, Santa Barbara, called the American Presidency Project. The departments and agencies. Agency websites are so helpful for finding contacts and current services of the agency, but often do not effectively lead us to the many publications past and present of the agency beyond those of a fairly consumer nature. If they did, we could just skip over the whole next section, but we can't. Here's the example of one that actually does a nice job of both. The Department of Education website has lots of good information about scholarships and grants, no child left behind, and under the research tab, under the research tab on the top toolbar, you are led to the many of the reports and statistics available over time from the Department of Education. So that's an example of a good one. Regardless of that, many agencies do indeed provide excellent standard titles electronically, whether or not they clearly link them to them from their own web pages. Don't miss number five. Let's look at a couple of these. If we're running short of time, we may not see them all, but let's try to. Here's don't miss number five with two important standard titles to tell you about. The catalog of domestic federal assistance contains detailed program descriptions for more than 2,000 federal assistance programs available to state and local governments, including the District of Columbia. This is a great place to take patrons. This will also include organizations and institutions, can get assistance, specialized groups, nonprofit organizations, and individuals. So it's a good place to take a patron who is interested in what kind of federal assistance is available perhaps to them or to their organization. The Occupational Outlook Handbook from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a classic. It's a reference title for information on occupations, details the training and education needed, earnings, outlook for the profession, what workers do on the job, and the working conditions in that profession. Don't miss number six. The CIA World Factbook sounds like it should be filled with classified information. But what it really does is provide information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and all kinds of transnational issues for nations recognized by the U.S. The FBI Uniform Crime Report. Ah, the Uniform Crime Reporting Program was conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police to meet a need for reliable uniform crime statistics for the whole nation. The FBI Uniform Crime Reports is where we go to find information on such topics as crime rates, what types of crimes are committed, hate crime statistics, for example, and the number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty. The reputation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC has taken a pretty bad beating during the last couple of years of economics recession. But the purpose of the commission, when it's working properly, is to protect investors and maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets. The inter-database on the SEC site provides detailed information on publicly traded companies listed on American stock exchanges. The economic report of the president sounds like it might be very dull, but it really isn't, and it's packed with well-researched information and statistics about our economy. On science.gov is one of my favorites. You'll see a small fire ant here on the top left. I hate to bring that up, but in the eastern North Carolina we have to be concerned about those. It's a great gateway to government science information that was always very hard to pull together, and you use it to access more than 45 databases and 200 million pages of science information. The national map, again, I don't miss. It's one of the cornerstones of the U.S. Geological Survey, and if you haven't used topo maps, geographic maps for your area, you're in for a real treat. You can see those through that site. The statistical abstract of the U.S. for statistics we're going to come back to in just a moment. The U.S. Bureau of the Census, American Fact Finder, the Bureau of the Census. Every 10 years the decennial census is taken, and the American Fact Finder is the Bureau of the Census' tool to help us make better, easier use of the census. And we'll have a specific session on that a little later in our series. For NC people, NCLink is a don't miss, and for simplicity's sake I'll let you explore that on your own, but it's the State Data Center of North Carolina that produces that using the U.S. Census. But they also add agency information as well, good for comparisons of various counties. FedStats, an overall tool to help us find federal statistics when we're just not sure where to even start. It's good particularly for topical searches. The search engine on it isn't great, but it's a good place to start when you're a little bit at fee. If I were on a desert island and I could only take one government source for statistics, this would be it, statistical abstract of the United States. And it's so important because you'll see that it tells you not only the statistics, but where they got it. So the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is where this came from. And it also tells us that Wards Automotive, it also tells us something else important. It tells us about a resource that is not a government resource, Wards Automotive. And that's a trade organization, a way to find additional information that we might need, at least a lead, someplace you can go from there. The regulatory environment, the Congress brought into being the Social Security Administration by an active Congress. But the rules and regulations of the Social Security Administration are actually established by the agency itself. And this is the regulatory environment. They have the force of law. They are not law. They do not go through Congress. They come from an agency. But they have the force of law. An example of this is the Federal Register, the official daily publication for proposed rules and notices. Well, the Federal Register grows up to be the Code of Federal Regulations. It's the codification of the general and permanent rules from the Federal Register. You'll remember that the statutes in large and public laws grew up to be the U.S. Code. I'm kind of a similar situation here. Don't let that word code throw you, okay? The U.S. Code is the law of the land created by Congress. The Code of Federal Regulations are the codified regulations of agencies under the executive branch. And in North Carolina, agency regulations are codified into the NC Administrative Code. So code is around a lot, and it doesn't always mean the same thing. Here's the new FDIS, FDIS website. It's very new. And what you see circled are many of the resources we've already talked about today. Tools. Well, what to use and when to use them. GTO Access, now FDIS. We've mentioned a number of times in our presentation the need for these, and that's our main tool for finding a lot of government information. But we need a real search engine, and there are really two that you need to know about. One is USA.gov, and the second is Google U.S. Government Search. USA.gov used to be called firstgov.gov, and Google U.S. Government Search was formerly Google Uncle Sam. Well, which is better? It's really a bit of a wash. But let me give you some clues as to which might be better for us. The USA.gov, let me go in reverse. Google USA, Google U.S. Government Search. And when it started, it could not pick up things like .mil, .gov, .com sites. And there are many U.S. government resources that actually have those endings. A National Technical Information Service runs on a .com. That's no longer the case, but that was a problem at the beginning. I'll mention this later why I prefer USA.gov and why, but it is a little bit of a wash. We're going to see also WorldCat, the OCLC database, and the FedStats. We'll come back to that in just a second. So, GPO access is good for no, particularly good for known items on relatively recent engines, such like congressional hearings go back only to 1985. For example, most other series only to the early 1990s, so relatively recent vintage. FDCIS provides free online access to official federal government publications. As I say, it's a bit of a wash, but let's take a closer look. The original Google wasn't picking up the .mil sites and so forth, but that's no longer the case. I'm sorry for the little jumble here. Of course, I dropped my notes on the floor, but I think I'm back to business here. USA.gov or Google USA government search, both are helpful when you're doing a topical search, particularly. Both have an advanced search page available, and doing most topical searches produces similar results in each. In this case, I did a search on elder abuse, and I found pretty much the best sites within the top five on both. USA.gov at this time has a cleaner interface, especially for consumer type things rather than academic information searches. So you can find services and agencies and contacts very easily on USA.gov. WorldCat helps us get stuff that we don't have, especially specific older items not available electronically. WorldCat is what is known as a union catalog, a catalog of many catalogs in a lot of libraries. Here's an example of a hearing concerning the establishment of outpatient eye care within the Veterans Administration. Veterans Affairs are very much in the news now, and healthcare for veterans is a very current issue, and this is a very old hearing. If someone's looking into the history of this, whether we should keep eye care within veterans benefits, they may need to go back to the original hearings. So that's here, the hearing itself. Now you have a known item, but you don't have it in your library, and you haven't been able to find it electronically. What the WorldCat also tells us is that Duke University has cataloged this in their library. Often libraries do not have their government documents cataloged in their catalog, their actual catalog. Some do, but many don't. And some libraries catalog their government documents using perhaps an LC classification and put them on the shelf with other materials to integrate them. In this case, Duke has cataloged this item as a book, and they have it in that manner. There is, in the WorldCat record, a sudox number. You can get the sudox number. And a large library with a deep archive of uncataloged printed hearings can still locate this in their collection using just the sudox number. So that's a lot going on in this slide, but the basic moral of that story is it's something you can't find electronically, and you don't have it in your library. And you know it exists, something very specific, and this will help you find it. You can find it in a large library or by using interlibrary loan with that information. All right, let's pull some of this together in real life. You don't really use government documents according to the slides we presented today, right? So you get questions. You get actual questions. So if someone wants to see the hearings and reports associated with the Challenger accident, okay? We talked about congressional hearings, and we mentioned that in this case you may or may not know the year that the Challenger accident occurred. But you perhaps need to just Google, okay? That's our first impulse, and it's not a bad one. In something like this, for hearings and reports, I would certainly try USA.gov, or if you come to prefer Google's U.S. government search. Who is my senator, and how has she been voting, or he or she, on major issues facing our country? You'll remember that we went to thehouse.gov or senate.gov site. We hear a lot about Rosie Wade. I'd like to read the actual opinion of the Justice of the Supreme Court for this case. You'll remember that we talked about Supreme Court cases being part of the U.S. reports, that the title of that series does not have the word Supreme Court in it, U.S. reports. How many Hispanics live in the United States, and how many live in my state? Well, it's a demographic, isn't it? And there are a lot of ways to get to this. We may try the stat abstracts, but chances are pretty good when you, especially after you have our session on American Fact Finder, that you'll go to the U.S. Census to find out that information. And if your state happens to be North Carolina, NC-Link. My neighbor's husband passed away suddenly, leaving her with two young children. I've heard she can get help from Social Security. Is that true? We know that agencies under the executive branch are brought into being by acts of Congress, but the regulations and the regulatory environment means that they set the regulations and the procedures. The first place I would try would be the Social Security site itself. There is a federal depository library program. It's very important to know about. It's having a bit of an identity crisis at the moment, now that a lot of documents are available electronically. But there are more than 1,200 depository libraries in the United States and its territories. In North Carolina, many of our large university and public libraries are selective depositories. They don't receive all of the publications selected by the superintendent of documents to go through the system. UNC Chapel Hill is our regional depository library, and they should receive everything. Here you'll find people who can help when you get in a bind. So talk to your friends at libraries that are selective or regional depository libraries. Learning more and getting some help. If I were trying to do that myself, I would examine the don't miss examples in this presentation. I would then, and this is, I do this still quite a bit, examine quality library guides on government documents. Many of these, the University of Michigan site was always a wonderful one. I learned a lot from them. Many of them, though, are better to use if you're trying to learn about a specific thing. I want to know more about congressional hearings. I want to know more about executive orders. But a lot of times you need to, you have an information need. You have a patron with some kind of subject or topic and they need information. These two are helpful because they allow you to browse topics fairly readily. The federal websites organized by Subject, by Oklahoma State, and St. Mary's. So taking some time to look at these ahead of time before you need them can be useful. And again, the FDLP libraries can help. And I'd like to thank Brenna. She did a wonderful job. That was a great session. Well, thank you for having me and thank you all for your patience.