 All right. Thank you. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for coming. My name is Kate Tallman. I'm the chair of the help. I'm an accidental government information library and webinar series. The series is brought to you by the American Library Association government documents roundtable. Thank you again for coming. You'll be muted during this webinar, but we encourage you to participate in the chat. If you don't see a chat window, kind of hover along the chat icon on the bottom of your screen and type in your question. If you have any technical issues during the webinar, Kelly Wilson is on hand to help. She has the name zoom tech. Also, feel free to chat directly with her and worst case scenario, please remember that this session is being recorded and will be available on YouTube. Real quick, I wanted to go over our upcoming webinar. Next up is November 15. This is the nuts and bolts of fruss the foreign relations of the United States. This is with Elizabeth Charles. She's a historian with the office of the historian and the Department of State and she's going to talk about what it publish takes to publish a fruss volume. If you have any topic ideas or would like to present, please let me know. My email is here Catherine dot W dot Talman at Colorado dot edu. And, especially if you're a member of an al a Godot committee and would like to co host event. I'm always happy to talk to you as well. And there's going to be a short survey at the end of this where you can share your thoughts on today's webinar and future ideas for improvement. Finally, here's our YouTube link on the screen where you can see all of our webinars published on our YouTube channel and you're welcome to subscribe to our channel as well. So today I'm going to introduce our whole talk because I'm part of the panel. Today's webinar is reporting on the world of government information panel presentation from the editors of government information landscape and libraries, which is a professional report published by ifla in 2021. Today's speakers are cake cell, Professor emerita of library and information science science at Rutgers, Jim church, who is librarian for economics, global studies, political economy and international government information at the University of California, Berkeley, and myself, Kate Talman, I'm the interim director for rare and distinctive collections and a federal depository coordinator at the University of Colorado Boulder. And here is an overview of our webinar today. Kay is going to talk about the contents of the webinar itself or the contents of the report itself. Jim is going to cover some of the editing and lessons learned there and what it takes to publish a report of this size, especially for an international organization like if law. And I am going to talk all about if law geops and try to recruit a few of you in attendance into joining us and learning a little bit more about what if I can do for you. And you'll see here also there is a QR code that you could take a picture of and that will take you directly to the if law professional report that we will be talking about. All right, so I'm going to hand it over to Kay. And thank you very much again for joining us. Hey. Welcome everyone. And I'm glad to be talking to you about this report that we that we completed a couple years ago now. It seems like just yesterday. Okay, so next. So the report is called the government information landscape and libraries. And I'm going to give you just an overview of it in order for you to have a sense of what is in this document. The publication provides a summary of the government information landscape for selected countries and regions worldwide. And it provides information on such things as publishing practices, depositories, legislatures, access to information, government libraries, preservation practices and digitization. The publication wants to make the point that government information is not easy to find. So government information professionals are needed to help users to find the information that they're looking for next. Oh, no, there should be another before that. Oh, no, you're right. God. Okay, so we'll start with Korea and young one Yang provided information on government publishing and preservation in Korea. There's in Korea there is no centralized or systematic government publications methods so each government agency publishes and distributes their own publications. And I think that the beginning of modern government publications in Korea began in 1950, but a recent creation the national digital library is being developed to provide better access for government publications. Next, Canada. So, I think that's why Peter's in provides a history of Canada's government documents system. The government depositories the library system actually goes back to 1927, and they officially ended printed documents in nine in 2014. Most government documents are now available online. And this deposit or services program that's been in business for a long time is now a DSP E collection. And many of the government documents are available on the open government portal. Next, the Middle East and North Africa. So, what happens here, ballet and list that are focused on government libraries in the Middle East and North Africa. They looked at different kinds of government libraries, including legislative libraries, judicial libraries and executive libraries such as libraries of ministries and departments of government. The services include document delivery and research assistance. They commented that the libraries, these government libraries tend to lack budgets, staff and technology. So the authors have suggested that the libraries need to work cooperatively through their library associations to strengthen the understanding of the value of libraries in order for them to be able to to function more better than they are functioning now. Next. The Russian Federation. We can just say Russian to our author did call it the Russian Federation. So, and as Tasia draws Dova documented the progress made in the Russian Federation toward more access to government information. So, since 2011, there's been an official internet portal of legal information. It's a website with legal parliamentary and judicial information. More, more government information is now available on the official websites of government agencies, for example, the federal tax service, and information is also available on the open data portal of the front of the Russian Federation, and on the National Digital Archive of Russia, which is an independent project. Next, sub Saharan Africa. Marisa Kamar and Dr. Clive summa provided an overview of access to government information in sub Saharan Africa, which includes Kenya, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, South Africa, Nigeria and Uganda. There are many challenges to accessing government information in these countries, but they indicate that progress is slowly being made. And they give some examples of some of the things that are happening that shows the progress that is being made. For example, the establishment of legal depositories, such as in South Africa, and government programs, such as in Kenya, collections and access to statistical information, and the establishment of some depository library so they are slowly moving forward, which is really wonderful to see. Next, United Kingdom. Hannah Chandler and Jenny Primshaw provided a very useful guide to the development of official publishing in the United Kingdom. Six official legal depositories in the UK and they work together to ensure that government information is collected, preserved and made accessible to the public. So, since the UK government depositories have been publishing on the internet since 1994. And in 2001, they developed what they call the UK online, which was a way to provide better access to government information for the general public. And this was, this was changed in 2016 to become gov dot UK. United States. Cassandra and a number of her colleagues provided a wealth of information on how to access for various parts of the US government information. Most US government information is now digital, so it can be found on the internet. Over 1000 libraries are part of the federal depository library program, which we call FDLP and provides access to government information. They identified some of the websites that provide information about US government publications. The catalog of government publications, CGP provides access to all publications distributed by the FDLP. Also, there is a government website called gov info dot gov, which provides information on Congress and some of the information on the executive branch. Another is Congress dot gov, which provides information on the US Congress. And finally, NARA and ARA dot gov, which provides information on the National Archive. Next. International government organizations. James Church addressed the nature and origins of international government organization information. He explored former and current functions of depository libraries and documentation centers, trends and IGO open access, and the counter movement of subscription based digital libraries. So that's one of the strategies for locating substantive material within large bureaucracies. So I, I guess that's my cue. I wasn't quite sure where you can end there but anyway, thank you very much, Kay. And Kate as well was a pleasure working with both of you. There's a little slide for me. And I think no further introductions needed. Could we have the next slide please, Kate. So yeah, I just have. Kate mentioned what I'm going to talk about today is more of the story of how we accomplished this fee. The editing and lessons learned and I can see there I misspelled lessons so that's not a good, you know, sign okay for editing in particular. That is mortifying. Believe it or not, I was actually, you know, very involved in the editing but I see that now and my God. All right, so anyway, let's move on. Here are some of the key issues that we faced recruitment formatting citations diplomacy flexibility and correspondence so I'm going to address each of these one by one. Next slide please so the overview and the recruitment part about it. The total time period that we needed to complete this process is actually almost 10 years from start to finish. It was initiated if memory serves at one of the offices I believe in Helsinki. And of course naturally we had the organization and if law which has got its hoops to jump through as well as you know we do and go toward every organization does. We first had to get it proved cleared, you know, authorized and then on. And then we were faced with the task of recruiting people from all over the world, who are willing and able to address government information publications and policy. It took a lot longer than we anticipated. We tried but there were just not that many people were immediately forthcoming and we wanted to doing eventually is working within our network of if a colleague so that's a really good place to start I mean I was surprised I thought we might find more volunteers but surprisingly it can sometimes be difficult these days for working librarians such as myself to car at the time to work on a substantial, you know, piece such as this and it was. It's a really grew at the outset we didn't have this concept that it was going to be as long as it was, but we found more and more people as time went on. And, you know, they contributed substantive chapters so I think we're very pleased with the end result but it did take a lot longer than anticipated so that's definitely a lesson learned plan for a long period of time if ever you're working on a publication it's probably going to be double at least the amount of time that you expect. So next slide please. So again this is sort of the recruitment, it was, you know, more difficult than expected, you know, to find people around the world willing to submit chapters on publishing and policy. So, yeah, at the end of the day we wound up primarily relying on colleagues within or had experience with an ifla. And I know people I asked a lot of people, but most people, you know, you know who submitted chapters wound up from being within the organization with the exception of some people that Kay found for example for the US portion that was, you know, done, done locally so that was great. Next slide please. Formatting. Okay, so this is a mistake that we made that we've really regretted later. So I'm going to distinguish between the formatting and the citations. So again we did not originally imagine that this was going to be a 160 page document publication we were thinking more 50 60 pages at first so we didn't really go ahead and specify strict formats when we asked the authors to submit it but then it became clear that you know the length is going to be quite long. And again I'm not talking about the citation style, whether to use end notes for it notes what's you know which format to use. I'm talking about just you know the margins, the fonts, whether or not they were going to have an abstract bullet points. People from all over the world have very different publishing conventions about how you're going to organize something. And it was just wildly different when we got it so it took a lot of time to reformat everything standardized the spacing and all that I mean it was just surprisingly difficult. One of the biggest challenges we face so again a lesson definitely learned there if you don't have a professional editor or a desktop publisher. Definitely allow yourself some time to do this. Next slide please. So the citations. This was an enormously time consuming constraint. So again, due to our, you know, oversight we didn't specify, you know, exactly which style to use. And we also had to work with various languages, Greek, Russian, Korean, Arabic and we decided in the end to use, you know, these native languages so we had to work and make that all fit in. Some chapters contained dozens, like many, many citations, which all had to be formatted correctly and checked. We also did not really want to choose an American style manual so we went with the IFLA recommendation which I believe is Harvard. And the other thing was of course is that government information is very link intensive. So we had to check every link in the, you know, while we were doing this so it just took a really, really long time. Next slide please. Because of the extended timeframe and people working on this over a number of years, we had to maintain contact and touch with them, you know, during this time period. And while they were working on this, some authors actually moved and had to be relocated. So again, I can tell you some stories. Some people, you know, actually experienced, you know, natural disasters. One of our authors from Lebanon, for example, happened to be working on his chapter when they had that enormous explosion in the port. So is there a concern about him? We had to find him. He was fine, but that was something else. Another one of our authors from Russia, Anastasia, left her job and relocated to the Russian countryside and was completely out of contact of all emails. So I had to rely upon my friend from IFLA to go locate her. And then there was all of the, you know, the contract arrangements and IFLA does specify that whenever you publish with them, at least in this format that you sign a Creative Commons attribution 4.0 international agreement. And those needed to be signed by all 22 authors and returned to IFLA. So that took a lot of time, you know, pursuing and making sure everything was signed. It took, you know, I don't even remember, but it was a lot more than we anticipated. And then finally, we spent a considerable amount of time. And I want to give a great shout out because IFLA headquarters was extraordinarily helpful, but we needed to work with them on the funding, we needed to work with them on the peer review. The publication was peer reviewed. And so it was submitted to several organizations within the, you know, IFLA bureaucracy who had some expertise in this and they all, you know, represented different sections. So they presented comments, ranks and they decided like on a scale of one to six how good is it. And, you know, in the end, I really welcomed their comments and feedbacks because we actually did go back and make some substantive changes as a result of the feedback. So I want to like definitely know peer review may seem like it's an intimidating process. But I think when it works well, it actually can be an excellent standard and can result in, you know, a better result. So, yeah, so next slide please. So diplomacy and the flexibility so if anyone has ever done this, you know, if you work with authors anywhere and you have to be in a position where you're going to be editing and making suggestions. It's certainly a good idea to be diplomatic and flexible. So because there are different styles globally about how to approach writing. You do have to take this in consideration whenever you're doing an international project. So not everybody likes writes like Americans. There's of course difference in spelling but there's also differences in style ideas about, you know, how descriptive you should be how detailed less or more so. So this was something we also had to keep in mind and just work with everybody to make it at once both more or less standard, but at the same time, maintain each author's individual personality and cultural style so this was a very interesting exercise. And what we did do is so we didn't get completely different, you know, submissions we did use an outline where we specified the types of topics that we wanted people to engage in. And then there was also just some flexibility we need to engage with with if the headquarters and all of that, you know, because we depended very much on them to, you know, get this going and make it happen. And once again, I mean I can't emphasize enough, having a good publisher someone is on your side willing to help you out was really an important part of this process. So, I think, next slide I think that's some. Oh yeah, one more. And then finding a cover, little things that we didn't consider, you know right at the beginning, like how do you get a cover that is representative of a government information library. So we thought about this, we're like okay so good to get pictures somewhere and it doesn't need to be our resolution and this and that and the other and eventually what we did was, we found one that had a government documents collection with a creative commons license, you know we asked permission and discussed it and then we just use this one. Sort of an old school government documents collection, and we attributed, but that was also something that we did not think of it first about how to best, you know, engage in this so again very nice and grateful that if it took, you know, a photograph and they created it, you know they used a template for it and I think they made it look really great, if I'm not saying. So I think, actually, that's about all I have and hope that was helpful and illuminating for any of you interested in pursuing a publication on your own, particularly within a group with involving multiple authors and sponsored by an organization, all these things need to be taken into account, you know the informational bureaucracy working with multiple people multiple deadlines, being realistic and planning ahead are really crucial. And if you've got sabbatical that would be great. Because there's absolutely no way I have to say that I could have finished this or we all could have worked on it together had it not been for the pandemic. I had a lot of time at home so to work on this with or not for that. I probably would have needed to take off an extended period of time to work on it because there was many, many hundreds of hours. I would say, altogether, maybe not many hundred, but at least 100 hours. Yeah, it really was. Well, and I'll say to Jim to your point about something that really struck me during the process was the the link checking because we had been editing this late later in the process right so we had, like you said we had to check every single link to make sure that they were accurate and oftentimes they'd actually moved or and then so we would have to for every single one of those links, we'd have to go in and dig around. That website and make sure that the link was act that the new link was accurate and that the content and information that was displayed on the page was reflected in the in the writing by the authors. So, and for the most part I think it was, but I remember really doubting myself when I was doing that part of the editing process, where I was kind of fact checking our authors right because that's what it kind of felt like was fact checking in a way. And yeah, so it was, it was sticky and thorny. So, okay. Thanks Jim. Thanks Kay. Kay, I apologize. I realized that the slides did not transfer over to our PowerPoint today that we wanted them the way they wanted them to so I do apologize for tripping you up there with that. Okay. Yeah. All right. So, I'm going to just talk a little bit about if law and geops provide a few helpful resources if you're interested in getting more into the world of international librarianship, learning about how to get involved and why you would be a part of if law also. First off, I realize we may not have covered some of the acronyms that we have been throwing around here so if law is the International Federation of Library Associations and institutions. It's an international service organization. I do think it's an, not sure if it's a nonprofit, but it has 150 countries represented and 1500 members. Geops is the government information and official publication section and that is a smaller working professional section within the if law structure and within the if law professional committee. So it's very similar to Godot. We have a large group of members, and then we have a smaller standing committee, kind of like a steering committee, and then we have three officers we have a chair secretary and an information coordinator. Jim is a past chair. Another one of our past chairs Cornelia boots is here today. Okay, Jim and I have all been on if law on geops and I've been the secretary for I was secretary for eight years and then I've started doing that again so and the W L I C or will it is the World Library and Information Congress this is the normally used to be the annual conference and that's up in the air now and I'll talk about that in a little bit. So a couple helpful resources if it does a lot of work, putting out data and information on the library field the international library field so I wanted to highlight just a few things there's the library map of the world. This is a really nice interactive data tool where you can look at kind of basic library statistics from around the world that if it has collected. It's a lot of fun to play around with and I do recommend that you take some time to check that out. There is a couple big publications that they do every year there's the trend report so this identifies five really high level trends and the information. World so shaping the information society spanning access to education privacy civic engagement and transformation. So here's a link to the 2022 if the trend report but it kind of keeps you up to date on what's happening in the field. If the journal is a peer reviewed journal with articles on library and information services on issues throughout the world. There's a lot of different international authors in there. I can imagine that the if the journals work is very similar to what Jim and we went through in editing our our professional report so I can't imagine doing that for many different journal articles throughout the year but that's a great resource. It's open access you can find it online very easily to big kind of piles of resources that I found to be pretty useful through if what our standards and the professional reports. The first are standards so these are up to date kind of best practices produced by the professional committees the sections advisory groups in consultation with other groups and often other professionals. So you can go to the standards page and find current standards on a lot of different topics. I pulled out a few that I thought were either relevant or interesting. There's the guidelines for legal deposit legislation. There's guidelines for libraries of government departments. There's guidelines for continuing professional development and for public internet access and library so any kind of concept within librarianship public or academic special or government you're probably going to find it. Some sort of standard in there whether it's up to date that's a question but you're going to find something there and that's some of the biggest work that if the sections actually do is produce standards or professional reports. And that's what this government information landscape and library libraries report was it was called a professional report. So these often they report back on the implementation of standards but they also report on all kinds of other things as well. So you can see a few examples here document delivery and resource sharing global perspectives. I think that's very similar to our report where they're kind of profiling what document sharing or resource sharing and document delivery looks like around the world creating a maintaining safer online world for children and young adults and libraries and kind of a fun one the world through picture books librarians favorite books from their country. So if the reports are full of and they're all of this is open source by the way all of this is open access. I mean, so you can go on to if those website and grab it. Geops as a section we have I think we're up to 14 or 15 members right now. And we have a newsletter that we put out each year we're trying to shoot for two to two next year but usually it's an annual newsletter. If you scan this QR code it'll take you to our to sign up to subscribe to the newsletter so you can get a copy as soon as it's issued. So usually we have a report from our chair K often does a nice interview with an international government information librarian. We normally have an article from another government librarian and reporting on some sort of work or project that they've done. And then we have information from our IGO partners like the World Bank or the United Nations. So you can join ifla you can either join as a personal member or affiliate or you can see if your organization or institution that you're associated with is a member of ifla and you might be able to join geops or you might be able to join ifla through that. You can also join our standing committee. So we would love to have you geops is a small committee at times we've struggled to keep membership up. We're doing really good right now thanks to Jim and Cornelia and all the efforts of the standing committee over the years. But we would love to have you join us. This is where all of our work gets done. We meet every couple months and right now we're co-opting members for this next term the 2023 to 2027 term. So this would involve joining ifla either as an individual or as a as an institutional member. I could talk to you about that if you're interested. And then you have to fill out a statement of interest that would go to the geops standing committee and we would determine if we can take on new members or not. So if you're interested in joining us we would be happy to have you. Why join. There's lots of good reasons you can meet librarians from around the world expand your network in a way that is very different than you would in the United States. Make lots of connections to people that aren't necessarily going to happen through a la but there's a lot of cross pollination there I would I would like to add. You can attend conferences in very interesting places we just got back from Rotterdam this summer. Dublin was last year been all over the place. So 2024 is canceled. It was going to be held in Dubai. And there were a number of protests and groups that disagreed with some of the organization's decision making around that conference and the organizing committee pulled out. So 2024 was canceled and we're not sure about 2025. So this is actually a good time to join ifla because it's going to be not as expensive. You won't, you know, the conferences won't be as pricey to attend. There's a lot of other good reasons you know building knowledge and professional expertise through the various seminars workshops events etc. And really to me this was this was important to me was it was I was able to explore new avenues for my own research or my own publishing and service. There's a lot of different opportunities with ifla than with other service organizations. So hopefully that helped sell you a little bit on joining us and if we would love to have you. And I am going to go ahead and open it up for question and answer from the audience. Thank you very much. And you're welcome to chat. Or you can raise your hand and we can allow you to talk. We don't have any questions that's okay too. Thank you so much for the question for the audience is anyone else out there considering any kind of professional publication working through an organization or on their own. And it's a butcher raised your hat. Hi Jennifer. Nice to. Yeah, Jennifer. Okay, hi. Thank you for what you guys do. And, and I'm a big supporter of government sources and always have been even back on microfilm. I have a project that's called the zombie list that is looking to organize historical context of cereals. My biggest problem was finding an open source bibliographic tool that could handle cereals. And a lot of, you know, the historical cereals are government sources. So how did you handle the organization of of the time series of the sources. And it was it a proprietary or wasn't an open source bibliographic tool did you use, or was it an Excel because you couldn't find anything that's any good. So I'm not quite sure. I understand. Records for all of the item records. You, or you guys were just doing collections, not title by title, right? No, no, no, we did have some titles in there, but it was, you know, collection of chapters, each of them. I'll say mostly some of them were a little topical like we had one on, you know, information security, you know, or, and we had one on international government but most of them were country specific. In each case, the person would write about the government information policies, the types of, you know, information produced legislative statistical, and would perhaps mention a few of, you know, the websites that were of interest, and talk about like say freedom of information access to information. And so forth. So usually just an approach of how like you would work as a reference library and if you're into taking to, you know, help someone with an interest in a particular country. So if you take a look at the US overview, it's quite, you know, extensive about how government information is published organized, distributed and accessed here. Oh, yeah. So I think with the exception of the topic on cybersecurity, they almost all had a country in focus and we didn't make any exhaustive lists of circles list. It was the policies around access and a policy. Okay, so how, how are you going to keep it evergreen, because, you know, Marrakesh change things. You know, the US open source versus public domain, those are all changing. And, and how, I mean, I mean, I hate to ask this, but how do you keep it up. Oh, it's not being updated this is going to have to remain like a statute, not a code you'll have to be, you know, blazing at a point in time. We're not doing our vision. And so if we ever get around to that, what we'd actually like to do is incorporate some countries or regions from around the world where we, you know, did not succeed like we really wanted. And this is even mentioned, you know, in the by the editorial team, you know, the peer review people to try to get more, you know, people like say, Latin America to participate. That was the one reach in the world where we just could not. We couldn't find someone. So it'd be volume two. Or just an expansion, you know, over revised, then extended version would be great to have a Latin American contributors. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, thanks Jim. I think even more of a focus on the kind of the ethos or the principles of government policy. The principles of government publishing, rather than just the specific sources. Because those are important, right, but also I think just understanding like how a country like sees the production of government information, like in society, not just. Here's the digital library. Here's the repository. Here's, you know, just having that more that over in a lot of the chapters do have a lot of that because you did mention how these are organized. How information is organized, how it's accessed, how it's preserved. And I think more of an emphasis on that in a future volume would be welcome to because it's impossible to keep up the links and all the changes, even that, you know, the US federal government information system is undergoing some pretty dramatic changes right now. That this, the chapter on the United States is, you know, soon going to be more out of date than we'd like it to be. In a lot of the countries, the authors would cite a specific statute or, you know, law passed into Gazette that would point to the country's access to information policies, depository libraries of any publishing programs. So there was a lot of legal citation throughout throughout the text. Right. Right. Well, I would also say in general, the things are changing fast. And, and you can see the beginnings in some of these chapters of the new digital information sources that are being developed in countries to give people better access. So it's just going to keep, you know, developing that way. So there are the, so it'll get better and better. So I think almost everywhere that's happening. And I found when I reviewed all the chapters that, at least for these countries, and at least for the professionals who work in this field, that access to information really was seen as a fundamental right. That's one of the biggest connections that I made between all the different chapters was that every, every country at least stated it doesn't mean that they act that way or that it's, it always comes through and how information is published or preserved in their countries. But it's a, it's a, it's kind of a fundamental understanding within their countries that it's, it's a right to their citizens to have access to some sort of information from their government. And there was also history there. I think a lot of people provided historical background about the region or country. So that was interesting. Everybody shares in the same struggles too. That's another thing that you kind of pull out of there. Everybody has barriers to access and barriers to preservation. So I was going to say that another good thing that IFLA has done, it's helped a lot of countries, like to develop a library association in their country, which really strengthens their ability to, to develop government information sources but other things too. But that's one of the good things about IFLA is, is helping other countries to, to get their library associations active and doing more. Anybody else with comments or questions? I gave it the, well, it may not have been 30 seconds, but I gave it probably 30 seconds. All right. Well, thank you everybody. Please scan this QR code to provide feedback on this and other webinars from the help committee. Again, see all of our great webinars on YouTube. And if you would like to learn about something else, I'm still looking for a couple of presentations for next semester. So at the new year, we have one in November and then we're going to take a break and then we'll be back in February. So thank you very much and have a great day.