 Welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Emily Nimsacont here at the Nebraska Library Commission, filling in for your regular host, Krista Burns, is away today. Encompass Live is the Nebraska Library Commission's weekly online event, hosted usually by Krista Burns, and covers a variety of library activities including things about stuff here at the NLC, things of interest to the library community generally, presented by either NLC staff or guest presenters. These one-hour sessions are free and offered every Wednesday at 10 o'clock central time. And they include things like presentations, interviews, web tours, mini training sessions, Q&As, various things like that. Today we have Laura Johnson, one of our NLC staff here. She is going to talk to you about some government resources on the web. Take it away, Laura. Thanks, Emily. Hi, everybody. Okay, we're going to talk today about .gov, the government on the web. I have to tell you that this is a very long presentation. When I thought about doing this, I knew that the government had a big presence. One second, I've heard somebody in the audience said that they are not getting any sound. Oh, dear. If somebody can hear us, can you please type something into the question box and let us know that we are actually transmitting all right? Oh, good. I'm getting, yes. Several, that's how they can hear. Excellent. All right, go ahead then, Laura. Okay. I knew that the federal government had a huge presence on the web, but I didn't get into this very far before I realized that it was ginormous. And I was going to have to make some decisions about how to do this. So I decided to make slides because that would be a little bit faster. And I had to select things to present rather than having everything. Today, we're gonna cover the 15 departments in the president's cabinet. I did send out a handout for everyone with all of the links on it to everyone that had registered yesterday. I sent this. If you want it later, just drop me an email. I'll be glad to send it to you. It's just a little Word document, but it has all the links. So don't worry about trying to take down URLs because that will make you crazy. Let's just get started and see if we can move pretty much through this. Is this gonna, it's not, it's the space bar, right? Not for the arrows. Well, let's try an arrow and see. Arrow did it, okay. As you know, the federal government has three branches, executive, legislative, and judicial. An awful lot of the government departments that we deal with are in the executive branch today. We're gonna deal with the executive branch. Of course, one of the big pieces of the executive branch is the office of presidency. And I had to make a decision and I chose to say, okay, I'll do the 15 cabinet departments, also part of the executive branch, and we'll deal with the office of the presidency the next time we do one of these. We said we would do it again in September and then again in October. And I don't know. We'll see if we can cover it all in that amount of time or we may go on forever. I don't know. So, this is the executive branch, the cabinet departments, it's a quick tour. All the departments do have a basis in law. That is, they will tell you the sections of the US code that authorize the department. One of the places to find out about the departments is in the US government manual. Of course, an old print publication, it is now on the web. And it will list all the departments. It will list the officers in the department and then it'll give you a link to their website. Another place is USA.gov, which is sort of the federal government's portal to departments. You can either get a list of departments or you can go by topic to find something useful but tends to be kind of broad sometimes when you're doing research. Another place you wanna look is fedstats.gov. This will find statistical information in federal websites. I will kind of emphasize statistics because they're really difficult. You can't just Google always. You can't always just Google and get statistics. Sometimes they're kind of buried in tables and things. So we'll be talking, we'll mention statistics fairly often throughout this presentation. I've put the things in alphabetical order because there seemed to be no real reason not to. So let's go. We'll start with the US Department of Agriculture. It has a budget of about $132 billion. Employee is about 106,000 people. And it really is concerned mostly kind of with rural life with food. This is what they say their mission is. Leadership on food and agriculture, that kind of thing. So here are some of the pieces of their website that I think a reference librarian or someone who was trying to help their library users would find particularly useful. When I chose which things I'd be showing here, I kind of had a few things in mind. I wanted resources for librarians that I thought would give them useful information. I wanted to find things that were typical of the cabinet websites, so I'll show them as examples. And then the opposite side of that, things that were kind of unusual. So I'll try to be pointing out sort of types of information as well as particular pieces of information, if that made any sense. The first thing from the USDA, the Economic Research Service, a thing that does, well, research on food, on agriculture, on rural life in America, and really a good source of information if you're interested in those kinds of subjects. Really a good place to start or anything about that. The U.S. Forest Service is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. One of the things you do find is you start realizing that many of these departments started in one, or many of these entities started in one department, one cabinet department, and have moved around. Over the years, different cabinet departments were in charge of different things. Right now, the USDA does have the U.S. Forest Service, which is not the National Park Service. The National Park Service is part of the Department of the Interior. Smokey the Bear, by the way, is U.S. Forest Service. Ask Karen a food safety education. You can put in little questions or find topics about how long it's safe to keep eggs in your refrigerator and things like that. A nice consumer-oriented sort of utility that they offer. Another thing, plants database. It's a great big database. I did a search here for Goldenrod, the Nebraska state flower, and here they give us a nice little profile of the plant. So that's another thing that can be very useful. People are looking for flowers or plants. The National Agricultural Library, one of the big national libraries is part of the USDA. You can search their catalog, they call it Agricola, Latin for farmer, and a really nice source of information. Also has a lot of information on women's issues, we're used to. And if you're a collector, has a complete set of the prints from the old yearbooks of agriculture that were the watercolor prints of fruits that people collect. So anyway, the National Agricultural Library is a very interesting and large body of information. The Nebraska World Development, I put this here because many of the programs, the really big programs from cabinet departments are actually kind of administered through the states. The cabinet department will then send out money usually, and sometimes directives, I suppose, to two departments that are in states. So Nebraska World Development is one of the departments that cooperates with and gets funds from the USDA. The Cooperative Extension Service would be an example of this. That has federal funding, but then it's in the states. And then another consumer kind of site, Choose My Plate, remember the old food pyramid that told us what foods we should be eating every day? Well, they have discontinued that now, and now it's your myplate.gov. And this tells us what we should be eating every day. This is an example of something that they seem to be doing more and more, which is instead of having a utilitarian URL, they try to have a descriptive URL, and they give it, so this isn't part of the USDA dot blah, blah, blah. This is ChooseMyPlate.gov. And we'll see this again and again that they have their kind of these, especially consumer-oriented kinds of things, have their own more descriptive URLs, but they're always .gov, so you can kind of tell that way where they came from. Okay, we'll go to the US Department of Commerce next. The Department of Commerce is concerned with business. It has a budget of $9.3 billion, so it's smaller. About 44,000 people. The President Obama would like to reorganize this department, and that means he would take pieces of it and put it with other cabinet departments and stuff. But meanwhile, this has some interesting things in it that you find useful. First, the Patent and Trademark Office is under the Department of Commerce. You can search for patents or trademarks, although if you need searches for, say, legal battles or to see if somebody else has already patented an idea or something, you do need a search from a patent attorney, somebody who's an expert on it. But you can go in there and search it and find very interesting things. Another thing they have is the Nationalist to Standards and Technology. Now, most products and industrial things in America do have to conform to standards. Standards are not generally created by the government. They are created usually by a trade organization because pretty much every product in America has a trade organization. Those standards then can be found at that trade organization or the American National Standards Institute, an independent organization, will adopt those standards. And if you need to find a standard, and this would happen if, say, a bridge collapsed. And the structural engineers wanted to show that the steel in the bridge did not conform to the standards that were enforced at the time the bridge was built or something. You would need a standard for that kind of steel. These can, used to be really hard to find. Today, you can find them, although standards you will rarely find for free. You'll usually have to pay for them. This is a list of places you can find standards. So it's a good place to start if you need a standard because it will lead you to places then where you can go to get the standards. Although, as I said, you'll probably end up paying for them. But it's nice that they're kind of giving us some guidance here. Another thing in commerce is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You think, oh, well, that's nice, but that means it's the weather service. The National Weather Service is part of the Department of Commerce. Here's the weather for Lincoln, Nebraska for a couple of days ago. You could also get some historic facts about weather. Again, an important thing if people are having lawsuits because there was an automobile accident six months ago and they wanna know if it was raining or not, or foggy. So you need historic weather. But this is a good place to go to get your weather. And the weather station here is in... Valley, Nebraska, in fact. But then also the Census Bureau, which of course is a huge entity. The Census Bureau does the decennial census that is mandated by the Constitution where they count, it's the census of population and housing, they count people. They have a nice utility that they have developed, the American Fact Finder, where you can search the census database and find the statistics you're looking for. It now covers the 2010 census and the 2000 census. I think there are a few things from the 90 census, but I'm not sure. Very often you will hear people talk about, oh, they've just released the 1940 census. Well, this is for genealogists. Census material that they collect about any particular person is confidential and they keep it confidential for 72 years. So in 2012, they released the 1940 census 72 years ago. And genealogists can now see information about particular people. The Census Bureau puts out some really nice publications. Here's an example of one that talks about the availability of census records about individuals. This is a PDF, you can go to their website and find it. They also have Fact Finders about finding other kinds of statistics and other kinds of information that I think are terrific. They're really great guides to how to do this. So the Census Department not only provides us with up-to-date information, and they do, between decennial censuses, they do not go home. They do a lot of other fact finding. In fact, they collect a lot of statistics for other departments. But anyway, the Census Bureau puts out Census Bureau numbers. Think about that. The next one is the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense, of course, is the largest cabinet department. It employs 718,000 civilians, and 1.4 active military and about 1.1 reserve military, but about three and a quarter million people in the military. So it's a huge department, a budget of $550 billion, which is over half of federal discretionary spending. So this is huge. They have, their mission, of course, is to run our defense. They have a really nice list of the websites that are defense websites. Many or most of these websites are not .gov, they're .mil, because they're military websites. Of course, the Air Force, Army, Navy. The Coast Guard is part of the Department of Defense in time of war, but in time of peace, it's part of Homeland Security. So I'm not gonna say a lot about defense because that's sort of its own subject altogether, but it's a huge department. It does have a nice finding list where you can go to get additional information. The U.S. Department of Education, this is the smallest cabinet department, has 5,000 employees, a budget of $71 billion, although the ARRA funding, the Recovery Funding, was significant. It was almost $200 billion from 2009 to 2012. So all of a sudden they got a big influx of funds, but the Department of Education itself is not huge. They don't actually do educating. They establish policy, they collect data, they oversee research. Some of the things they have, a nice thing on federal student aid. So if people are looking for Pell grants or federally insured loans or things, they have a lot of information here which would be of interest to people. They also have, which I thought was really kind of interesting, a database of accredited institutions of higher education. So if you're looking at a school or one of your library patrons is looking at a school, you can go here and see if it's accredited. They do not do the accreditation. Accreditation is done by various organizations, associations, but they collect the information. So you can look here to find out if someplace is accredited. Another thing from the Department of Education is Eric. The Education Research or Resources, I think, Information Center, great big database of information about education, includes journal articles, research reports, even books. Eric, of course, can be accessed through First Search, which is part of Nebraska Access. But Eric also has its own website. It is not a full text database, but the records are very meaty. They have good summaries of things in them. Eric has its own particular vocabulary. And if you do a lot of Eric's searching, the Eric thesaurus can come in handy. But Eric is another one of the big, big sources of information. It's a big index, it's a big source of information. Then Education also has the National Center for Education Statistics. I told you we would be talking a lot about places where you get statistics. It turns out that if one place collects, because statistics are really very expensive to collect, and the government collects a huge amount of statistics, if somebody collects a statistic, chances are no one else will collect that same statistic. They might collect a statistic in the same area that's slightly different, but chances are a government statistic on a particular thing is the statistic you're gonna find. The National Center for Education Statistics, of course, puts out a big annual report. They collect things on, oh, student, how many kids drop out? What, how much school districts span per pupil? How many people are on federally supported lunches? All kinds of things. So this is the place to go if you need any information on education statistics. Then the next one's the Department of Energy, which does a lot of research, mostly, on energy, and it's also got the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So for instance, you hear about these labs, the Argonne National Laboratory, the one in Batavia, Ferry National Lab, all these labs are part of energy, and they have some very interesting information. Then the next department is the Department of Health and Human Services. Now this is the, they put out about a quarter of federal outlays, partly because this is where Medicaid and Medicare money comes from, but also they administer more grant money than all of the other federal agencies combined. They are underwriting an awful lot of medical research, so their mission is to help keep Americans healthy. So what are some of the things under Health and Human Services? Well, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, you'll hear about this whenever there's an outbreak of a particular disease, flu or something, the Center for Disease Control will do research on it, see where the outbreaks are and that kind of thing. Under the Center for Disease Control is the National Center for Health Statistics. Again, a huge collection of statistical data on health issues. So another, a place where you'd wanna look. They have, the HHS is the Food and Drug Administration. Now we know that the USDA is concerned with food, and now here's the HHS being concerned with food. Well, the USDA does inspections of meat, poultry and eggs. Other foods are the FDA. So, and of course the drugs, whether new drugs can be put on the market and that kind of thing are organized by the FDA. They're also the Public Health Service. Now this is where the Surgeon General comes from. The Surgeon General is the head of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. They all wear uniforms. So, kind of an interesting fact. Another thing, the National Institutes of Health. There are a number of National Institutes of Health. Remember, Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of Nim, 72 Newberry winner. That's one of the National Institutes of Health. Another part of the National Institutes of Health is the National Library of Medicine. One of the big organizations, one of the big libraries, the big national libraries. And of course they put out Medline. They do a lot of educational programs themselves on the kinds of materials that you can get there. Many of these materials, of course, for medical journals are really written for experts and they can be kind of tough for your lay person to interpret. But they also have some information for lay people. But the National Library of Medicine here in Nebraska, the Nebraska Medical Center works with the National Library of Medicine. Then they have the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Again, see, this is called Medicare.gov. So this is another one of those more descriptive URLs that they're moving toward. They have tried very hard to make Medicare a little easier for people to understand but there's still a lot of material here and you have to go through it kind of carefully. This is one of the things I would want to encourage anybody to do when you go to one of these websites is or have a goal, do one a week or something but look around. They have some of the most amazing things here. I have to tell you how impressed I was. I kept thinking, well, this is where all our tax dollars are going. These people are doing great stuff. I mean, there's all these services and things in these departments that you don't always think about but it's kind of astonishing when you get them all together. My goodness, all the things they're doing. Okay, the next department is the Department of Homeland Security and this is the third largest cabinet department. About 240,000 people work there, budget of about $60 billion. Homeland Security, of course, is a fairly new department and several things that were in other cabinet departments were kind of moved into Homeland Security. So the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Customs, of course, if you've ever shipped anything, imported anything from another country, you have to fill out all these, you have to conform to all these regulations and fill out forms and things. Border Protection with the Border Patrol. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will react to any, well, emergency that we have. This is part of Homeland Security now. The Citizenship and Immigration Services. This is where people get their green card or become citizens. Used to be part of the Department of Justice is now part of Homeland Security. Now the Coast Guard. Remember we said that the Coast Guard is part of the Department of Defense in times of war, but in time of peace is part of Homeland Security. Then the Transportation Security Administration, the people who will rescue at the airport, TSA. There's quite a bit of stuff here about information on flying if you're wondering about what exactly can I pack in my suitcase and I carry on. It'll tell you here. So they've tried to make it, provide information to people that they think people will need. So that's Homeland Security. Then the next department is the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Mostly HUD, excuse me, is concerned with financing, housing. About 10,000 people work there, $44 billion budget. And they want to help people own homes really. They have the Federal Housing Administration, which kind of regulates and looks over some of this stuff. They have these neat graphics. I thought these infographics were kind of cool. This was kind of buried. You had to go to resources and then to data sets and then to infographics. But these are the factors that people thought were important when they chose their neighborhood. I thought this was kind of cool the way they presented this information. Also, I thought it was an interesting example of something that was neat, but you had to really dig for. And this is what I mean about, look around these websites when you have time because there really is a lot of interesting information. Okay, Ginny May, the federal agency that ensures mortgages, or actually no, they don't insure them. They're the ones that package mortgages and sell mortgage backed securities. They have some interesting utilities for the consumer. This is a calculator on, I think this one is a loan estimator. They also have should you rent or buy, how big a mortgage can you afford, what mortgage rates, they have several utilities. You can find other kinds of calculators like this on the web, but I think one from the government, I don't know, do we trust it? I think we trust it more. Again, they're trying to offer things that they think the average consumer would be interested in and would find useful. Next departments, the department of the interior, 71,000 people, $20 billion budget. They manage about, they say, 507 million acres of land, which is about a fifth of the area of the United States. They have 388 national parks, monuments, seashore sites, et cetera. 544 national wildlife refuges through fish and wildlife. So they're really talking a lot about our natural resources and tribal communities because, of course, this is where the Bureau of Indian Affairs resides. They also have the Bureau of Land Management, which is looking over all that land, and the National Park Service. Remember, USDA, we talked about the National Forest Service? This is the National Park Service. And part of the National Park Service is the National Register of Historic Places. And this will explain to you how you get on the National Register of Historic Places and it has a search where you can find listed the places. So I searched for Nebraska, for Cherry County, which is that great big county out in Western Nebraska, but it does not have a huge population. They still had 13 historic places. And then you can go and actually link to pictures of the places, get some information about the places. So this is very interesting. Now they did say that it's not currently working in IE, it works in Chrome and Firefox. So just a tip if you're going to go search this. But kind of interesting. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is here in the interior and the US Geological Survey. Why is this important? Maps. The US Geological Survey are the people that do the mapping. So especially if you're looking for topological maps, things like that, you wanna go here. And they have a library and they have an Ask a Librarian program. So you can put in your question. So if a kid is doing something about geology or earth science, he can put in his question here and they'll try to answer him. So I thought that was kind of neat. We can all find out about volcanoes then. But that's the Department of the Interior. Then we get to the Department of Justice. Justice has about 112,000 employees, $28 billion budget. And what Justice does is really, they handle the court cases that involve the federal government. So the US attorneys do the trial work. They do criminal and civil cases and they do collections of debts that are not administratively collectible. I'm not quite sure what that means but that's what they said. The other part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is part of the Department of Justice. And they have a great thing of statistics. The Uniform Crime Report, they do the crime statistics every year. And they also have hate crime statistics, mortgage fraud reports, all these other kinds of statistics. So if you're looking for crime, here's where you go. But then there's the Bureau of Justice statistics too and this gives you, you know, number of incarcerations, prisons, that kind of thing. So sometimes, as I said, generally if one agency or entity collects a statistic, no one else is gonna collect the same statistic but they might collect statistics in the same area that would be a little different. So you may have to look at both these places but for crime, for, you know, how many muggings there were, you want the Uniform Crime Statistics. They also have the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. They have the U.S. Marshals Office who protect judges and witnesses and things. That's the Department of Justice. Then we have, how am I doing at time? I'm doing pretty well on time. I'm sipping right through this we are here, we're on slide 78. This is the Department of Labor. Labor is concerned with working people and we have about 17,000 people work for the Department of Labor budget of about $13 billion. One of the things you might think you would find at the Bureau or at the Department of Labor would be the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. No, that's an independent agency. But Labor does have the Bureau of Labor Statistics, another huge source of information about people working, average wages, unemployment figures and one of the really interesting things, the Consumer Price Index which is the measure of inflation. That comes out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here's an example of some kinds of things the Bureau of Labor Statistics does, the percent of total employment. So people who are in education, training and library earn an average of $50,870 a year. And they are a little over 6% of the people employed in America work in that area. So, you know, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does put out a huge lot of information and they do articles, remember the monthly labor review that journal comes out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They also put out the Occupational Outlook Handbook, used to be that great big orange book. I don't know if it's still even in print but it is on the web, one of the things that you would certainly wanna look at if people were investigating careers. Young people, you know, kids in school or people who are just looking for a career change or whatever, the Occupational Outlook Handbook is one of the first places to go. They have the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, which will talk about hazards in the workplace. I thought this was funny, health hazards in nail salons. But they do a lot of workplace standards. They'll do a lot of things on materials. So, if you're interested in, you know, the chemical effects of some kind of cleaner or solvent or something, chances are you could find it at OSHA. This is a program that they're starting, distracted driving, that's what we're calling it now. Distracted driving and OSHA has a program. We'll see this later in the Department of Transportation too, they're also doing distracted driving. But this is, you know, the government tries to deal with things that they think are issues and so this is the kind of thing you see. Okay, our next department is the Department of State. I think it's very funny that we jump from L to S, all the way to S but we do and the Department of State of course is our foreign service and our international relations. There are about 11,500 foreign service employees, 7,400 civil service employees and about 31,000 foreign service nationals working for the State Department, a budget of about $27 billion. They have some really interesting information. They have a list of countries of the world. I selected one of the countries and clicked on it, Kosovo and I got this nice little page about it. They gave me a map, they showed me the flag and then I can go for further information. They put out a, and they have links then to fact sheets. They used to put out a thing called background notes on different countries, it's now fact sheets. But these fact sheets, when you have those school reports where everybody has to do a country, well these fact sheets can give you great basic information. They keep them very updated. This might be something that you would even consider printing and having in your library. Although you can always get them on the web but the information about countries is great. Then they also have, you can get updates. So I signed up just to see what would happen and yesterday I got a message saying that they had updated the fact sheet on Zambia and they gave me a link to it. So this would be a great way to not only have these fact sheets but you can keep them updated. I thought it was very nice, I liked it. Okay, they also put out the list of our embassies consulates and diplomatic missions. So this is where our embassies are around the world with links to them and they have their own websites, many of these embassies. They have a Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and this is about cultural and educational exchanges. Who knew that the Fulbright scholarships are administered by the Department of State? I didn't know that, did you? These are international exchange scholarships and they're part of the Department of State. Another thing here is the youth page and Department of State. Now, many of these departments have particular pages or materials for children or for use in schools or curriculum kinds of materials. So this is something to look for in all the departments. I only picked out a couple to show you but Department of State for Youth is here. The Department of State also has information on doing business in other countries. You can search this. I searched the US Commercial Service to ask for how to do business in Brazil and I got back in the apparel and textiles industry and I got back an 86 page report. Somebody was gonna export materials. This would be a great place to get basic information. So again, another place to get information about countries. They also have the US Commercial Service. They have the country commercial guides that we talked about and it was a long, big thing. They also will give you a lot of travel information because remember the Department of State is where you get your passports and visas. You may go to your local post office but it's the Department of State that's actually issuing them and you can go in and look, ask about a country and they will give you specific information about traveling in that country. So another people who are ready to take the tour. This is a good place to go for information. So they have several places in the Department of State website itself where you can get information about countries the fact sheets, the commercial service, the travel information. You can really find out a lot right there. Okay, the next department. We're coming, we're doing pretty well here on time and we're getting to the Ts. So we're getting there guys. This is the US Department of Transportation. They're interested in planes, trains, automobiles and our highways. So one of the things I wanted to show you that here's the mission. They want our transportation and our US highways, that kind of thing. Here's a briefing room. Almost every department has either a briefing room or a newsroom or a list of press releases. So if there was something that happened quite recently that's the place to go to see if you can find out about it, their briefing room or their newsroom, what they've put out quite recently on a particular subject. Okay, and another part of the transportation, the Department of Transportation, the merchant marine as part of the Department of Transportation. Then of course the Federal Highway Administration and sea distracted driving, we're back to that. And they have, if you dig down, and I had to really kind of dig down for this, they have a national bridge inventory, honestly, a list of all the bridges. I searched for the bridges in Nebraska. I got a table of all the counties and it listed, I picked Douglas County had the most bridges at 495, that's the county where Omaha is. Arthur Grant and McPherson counties didn't have any bridges. Of the 495 bridges in Douglas County, they said that 66 were functionally obsolete and 19 were structurally deficient. So, you know, an interesting thing, somebody's gotta keep track of those bridges, I guess, and they do it. They also have national traffic and road closure information. Yes, you can dial, it's 511, isn't it, to get information, but they also have it here on their website. Another part of the Department of Transportation is the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, which regulates air traffic. And again, statistics again, I keep harping on that. The airline on time statistics and a lot of other statistics too. But here's where you can get those. They have a thing where you can search for statistics on particular airlines. And, see, I told you, we're back to distraction.gov. They're really concerned about distracted driving because of course it does cause accidents. So, I don't know if the Transportation Department and OSHA are going to work together on this or not. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. The departments work together. But the Department of Transportation also has information on distracted driving, which may end up being a good subject for papers in high school this next couple of years. So, we come to the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Now, what does the Treasury do? Well, basically they collect money and they pay the bills. That's kind of where the Treasury's coming from. 116,000 people, a budget of $13 billion. You might hear of the Federal Reserve and somehow that in your mind, because it is in my mind connected to the Treasury. No, no, the Federal Reserve is an independent agency. So, you have to understand that. But the Internal Revenue Service is part of Treasury. Of course it's a big agency. I think they've tried pretty hard to explain more about what's going on in the IRS, what the regulations are. They have the forms here online. So, that's the Internal Revenue. They also have the U.S. Mint that makes the money or creates the money. Well, anyway. And the Mint has a really nice little newsletter for kids. So again, this is another one of those pages specifically designed for school children, for youths in schools, that kind of thing. They also have the Bureau of the Public Debt, which basically, this is where you get your savings bonds. The Bureau of the Public Debt sells three kinds of government securities, T-Bills, T-Notes, and T-Bonds. T-Bills are short term, just a matter of a few days to 52 weeks and they're sold at a discount. Treasury notes have maturities of two, three, five, seven, or 10 years and they pay interest every six months. And Treasury bonds have a maturity of 30 years and they pay interest every six months. So, the Bureau of the Public Debt is keeping track of what we owe. So, that's the Department of the Treasury. Okay, we're back to the last one, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. This is the second largest department. So, Defense is the first largest and Veterans Affairs is the second largest. 279,000 employees, a budget of about $88 billion. Their mission is to serve veterans. They talk a lot about veterans benefits, including the GI Bill. They also deal a lot with veterans healthcare and they have these health topics, A to Z. You can search these and I thought they were generally written at a very understandable level. They're pretty general, but they're good. You know, I looked up GAUT, it had a nice explanation. They have an Office of Rural Health, which for some people in Nebraska can be useful. Is this something we should... Okay, we won't worry about that. So, for anything for veterans, this is the place to look. They also have, and I thought this is an interesting and useful, potentially useful for librarians to know about, the nationwide gravesite locator. Any veteran who's buried in a national cemetery, you can find out where, simply by using this locator. They don't have data prior to 1997, although if you need older data, you can write to them and ask them about it. So, if you need to find a grave, this is, genealogists might do this. Some people might want to know this. So, this is a nice service that they have. So, that was it. We got there, I did it, that was really fast, wasn't it? But I hope this has given you an idea of the breadth of these departments and what they're doing. I've given you just a few samples from their websites, but I hope that's given you an idea of kind of the kinds of things you're gonna find there. I would suggest that you do look around if you have the time. Some of these are huge websites. Some of them are much easier to use than others. It was very funny, the structure of some of them. The Department of the Interior, I thought was very clear how they organized themselves. Homeland security is trying to be friendly and it makes them very hard to use. That's just my opinion. But I thought this was interesting. I had a really good time doing this, by the way. There's nothing like, you know, kind of searching for buried treasure, which is sort of what I felt like I was looking for here. We are gonna continue and try to do more federal websites because of course, this is just the cabinet, just the 15 cabinet departments. This is me. If you need to send me a line, please do. If you'd like the handout, you didn't get it yesterday. I'll be happy to send it to you. Although our things are also on delicious, the links are also on delicious. Our next Fed on the Web is gonna be September 19th. At that time, I am going to try to cover the White House, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch that may be optimistic. But I'll get as much done as I can and then we're gonna have a third session in October and at that point, I guess we'll decide if we need to go on or not. So there you go. The cabinet on the web. Does anybody have any questions? We have about five minutes. Yeah, if anybody has any questions, either type them into the question box or if you do have a microphone, just type in the question box that you have a microphone and you want me to unmute you when you can go ahead and ask a question over your microphone. So far, we just have one comment coming in. Great overview and love the handout. Thanks. Oh, good. Well, I hope I haven't stunned everyone into silence here. I think it's just with a good proof of thought. Well, there's a lot of stuff there. I'm gonna pursue it as they have interest. Any other questions, comments? It doesn't look like it. If you do, you have Laura's contact information, so I'm sure she would definitely not mind you getting in touch after that. Oh no, I've been happy to. Thank you all for joining us. We will be back next Wednesday, as usual, for another edition of Encompass Live. Okay, bye-bye. Bye-bye, thanks.