 Okay, awesome. Thank you everyone for coming. It looks like our numbers are slowing down a little bit. This is great. A lot of names I don't recognize and some I do. So welcome to people who've been coming and to the people who are new to our webinar series. So my name is Linda Kellum. I am the data librarian at the Cornell Center for Social Sciences and the chair of the Government Documents Roundtable for another month and a half. So welcome to the Help I'm an Accidental Government Information Librarian webinar series or Help for Short. This series is brought to you by the American Library Association's Government Documents Roundtable and the NCLA Government Resources section. In the future, Godard's going to take over the webinars and these organizations in the NCLA and Godard are working together to bring the series or to bring you the series during the transition. So thank you very much for coming. Oh, wow. We have quite a few people came in there. Please keep your audio mute. Well, you have to never mind. This is all instructions. We encourage you to participate and chat throughout the webinar. You can also use the Q&A. With the Q&A we're able to track when questions have been answered. So that's preferred if you have a specific question. But you're also welcome to use if you accidentally use the chat or you prefer the chat, feel free to do that and we will get to your question and I'll keep track of questions as they come in. If there are technical issues, Samantha, you will see her name and she has tech supports beside of her. She is our tech support person and she is on hand to help you feel free to chat with her directly if you can or just chat with panelists and we'll get to you as soon as we can. In the worst case scenario, we are recording the webinar and you'll make it available as soon as possible after the session. So we have no webinar scheduled for this summer. We have a great, Godard has a lot of sessions planned for ALA or not a lot. We have some sessions planned for ALA. We're very excited about one session is on the impact of COVID on marginalized communities and how libraries have responded and then the second session is going to be on the evictions crisis, getting to know what's going on there and then also how libraries have responded to the evictions crisis during COVID-19. So we encourage much more information becoming out about those sessions in the next couple of weeks and I am very excited about those and I hope you can join us. In July and August, we are going to take a little vacation from the help series so I encourage you to go outside and learn paddle boarding. That's what I'm going to try and do this summer maybe. And then in September, we'll come back together with the Civic Switchboard Project. They're going to talk about their data literacy project that they've been working on for about a year now. I'm still always happy to have suggestions so if you have ideas or if you'd like to present, I see Jeremy Darington in there. Maybe I can get him to present something again. We would love to have your ideas so please get in touch with me and let me know if there's something you would like to see us do or if something you would like to present on. So I'm very excited to have with us today Jennifer Horne. Let me stop sharing. Jennifer is the Business Economics and Government Information Librarian at the University of Kentucky. In this role, she supports the schools of business, public policy and administration and diplomacy. She also serves as the library's forward-facing contact for government information. Prior to joining the UK, she spent more than 20 years in public policy research and legislative affairs for organizations that represent state and local officials, including the Council of State Governments, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. She earned her Master's in Information Science from the University of Tennessee, a Master's in Legislative Affairs from Washington, George Washington University, and a Bachelor's Degree in Politics and Spanish from Washington and Me. So thank you very much Jennifer. Thank you so much Linda for that introduction. And good afternoon. Welcome to everybody for coming. Thank you so much for joining me right before Memorial Day weekend. I do not want to repeat my bio too much other than to say that before becoming an academic librarian I did have a whole separate career in public policy and legislative affairs and not really by design, but I ended up working solely for membership organizations that represented state and local officials. So at both the Council of State Governments where I was the Associate Director of Policy and the National Conference of State Legislatures where I worked pretty much right on college. Those were both organizations that explicitly had members from either just state legislatures or in the case of CSG from all three branches of state government. I also worked for the International Association of Chiefs of Police where I did a lot of state legislative work. So what that means is I have spent a very large portion of my professional life searching for legislation and laws both at the federal and the state level. I've done multiple what I call 50 state surveys where I try to find out the law on a specific policy area for all 50 states, mostly for CSG's Book of the States, which is a resource I hope many of you are familiar with and I'll be talking a little bit more about later. I also worked on CSG's shared state legislation program where I work to identify first in the nation bills and bills that were innovative, you know so again looking at lots of different legislative websites and news sites. And this also means that I have been on all 50 state legislative websites and I know the ones that make it easy for people to find information and the ones like to put a charity boy do not. And so I'm going to talk a little bit today about the differences between state legislative websites and other alternative strategies for finding state legislative information. So in this series, there have been lots of presentations about state government information, most of them targeted to finding information for a particular state. Today I'm going to focus more broadly on finding state legislative information and I'm also going to talk about, as I just mentioned, like ways, the differences between different state legislative websites and strategies for doing multi-state searches. So many of you are probably if you're familiar with state legislative websites at all, you're probably familiar with your home state and maybe not have and maybe haven't spent lots of time on other states enough to really recognize how different they are in terms of the types of information they provide and how easy it is to find that information. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. So today, you know, my presentation is on researching state legislation and putting on your detective app. And you know, I don't know that I'm stylish as stylish as that detective images, but there aren't very many of them and they clearly needed to be wearing a hat for it to make sense. But before I really get started on how to find state legislation, I want to talk just briefly about why state legislation is so important. And you know, really most of the attention in the news is focused on the actions for or in reality, the lack thereof of the US Congress were focused on presidential elections versus state local elections. I would argue that state legislatures are increasingly deciding issues that affect citizens most directly. And just for some examples here, you know, we're waiting on Congress or the Senate to take up voting rights legislation. But in the meantime, as of April 1st, legislators in 47 states have introduced 361 bills that restrict voting rights. Similarly, you know, everybody's watching the Supreme Court to see what they'll do with a major abortion case. But since January, 61 different abortion restrictions have passed in 13 different states. And eight of those would entirely outlaw abortion if Roe versus Wade were to be overturned. And finally, you know, the George Floyd Placing Act pending in Congress. While that is at the moment not going anywhere, lawmakers in 47 states have introduced 545 bills that address policing reform. And so far that year, 41 of these bills have passed one or both chambers and 18 of them have been enacted into law. So my point is, is that while all of the national news interest is on Congress and the presidency, meanwhile, all of these actions are being taken at the state level. And these are just big issues, right, that make the news when all the other legislation that states pass really directly have a direct effect on people's lives, probably more so than what is passed by Congress. Just to put this in perspective, the last session of Congress, which ran from 2019 through the beginning of 2021, they enacted 344 laws. And so far this year, they've enacted 15. In 2019, state legislatures passed 18,000 bills. That's a lot of bills that affect a lot of people. And so, you know, one of the things that I want to talk about is how researching state legislation is similar and different than finding federal legislation. And the most notable difference is that, of course, there are 50 plus legislative websites. Here are some examples, all of which have very different ways of presenting information, very different levels of information that's provided to the citizens of the state. It's not like congress.gov that you could master and then be able to really figure out all of what's happening at the federal level. You have to get comfortable in navigating all of these different sites, and they are very, very different. And another key difference is sadly there's so much less media coverage of state houses and their actions. So it has been seven years since the survey was last done, but from 2003 to 2014, state house coverage by newspapers declined by over 35%. And I'm sure that that is even worse today. And even more broadly, newspaper employment in the U.S. has dropped by almost a quarter in the last 10 years. And the number of newspaper newsroom employees dropped by over 50% between 2008 and 2019, which means that there just aren't reporters covering the day-to-day actions in the legislature. And that is really a problem in terms of people's ability to understand what is happening, what kind of bills are being passed, what, who are the supporters and opponents of those bills. This lack of transparency has a major effect on people's thoughts about their state governments. And so, you know, just to talk briefly about state legislatures, when I say they vary greatly, I don't just mean based on their architecture, although I do find this fascinating. You can see here, you've got in the, from the top left, you've got California, which looks very much like the U.S. Capitol. You've got Hawaii, you've got the Grand in New York building, and then you've got Nebraska's office tower. But there are just lots of differences between the state legislatures. First of all, just the size. They range from just 49 senators in the unicameral Nebraska legislature to 425 in New Hampshire. It's the second largest legislature in the country, second only to the U.S. House. You've also got major differences in whether legislators are full or part-time. And NCSL, the National Conference of State Legislatures, categorizes them this way, that 10 states have full-time legislators, which means they meet throughout the year. The legislators are paid significant salaries enough that they don't have to have another job. There are large numbers of professional staff who work at the legislature to support the lawmakers. The rest of them are part-time, and that's divided between 26 states that they categorize as hybrid. These are states that are part-time. They have intermediate pay and staff, not everybody who works, who's a legislator, has a second job versus a citizen legislature, which is part-time, very low pay, very small staff. These people for the most part have other jobs. To put this in perspective, California lawmakers make almost $115,000 a year. New Hampshire legislators make $100 a year, and they get no per diem. New Mexico legislators make zero salary, but do get a per diem. Some states don't even meet every year. You've got Montana, Nevada, North Dakota. This surprises a lot of people, but Texas, they only meet every other year. Here's a map from NC cell that just shows the different types of legislatures. The green are the full-time. The darker green are like the really full-time. The lighter green are what they call full-time light. You see that most of the states are the hybrid and the gray, and then you've got the part-time and the super, super part-time. Just the number of professional staff who are available to support the legislators just very significantly again. California had 2,100 staff, professional staff. The last time the survey was done in 2015, and Vermont had 92. It really shouldn't be a surprise that state legislative websites vary so much, and that they provide different levels of information, and that the ease of finding information varies greatly between them. With that said, it seems obvious that if you're looking for information on the bill, that you would start with the state legislative website. I know that I always learn to go to the authoritative source and looking for a bill in Congress. I'm going to go to congress.gov, although I will date myself and refer to it as Thomas. I'm here to tell you that depending on what state it is, it's really not necessarily the best place for you to start your research. Finding information on the state legislation can be more difficult than you think, especially since all of the information should be publicly available theoretically, and this gets even harder if you don't have key information like a bill number, and you'd be surprised by how often you do not have a bill number. It's not reported in the news, and you have to really go hunting to figure out how to find this bill, and that's where I talk about needing to employ different strategies. This is where you really need to become a detective and think about how you can figure out the bill number in order to find the bill text and other information. One of the main ways to do this is to identify the stakeholders for the bill. Who cares the most about the bill? You can look to see if they have published any information on it, if there is a statement about why they support or oppose it. Those kind of statements are much more likely to include a bill number than, say, a news article about a bill. One of the things that I generally have to think about when you're starting a state legislative kind of search is you have to really figure out what is it that you know? If you know the bill number, this is going to be a lot easier. You might know a bill title that might have been mentioned in a news article, or you might have seen a quote from the bill sponsor. That might also help you find it. In a pinch on most websites, you can do a keyword search, although it's not always as easy as you think it will be. You might also know from a news article, like who are the groups that support or oppose it, that might also be a way to try to figure out the bill number. My example for this is you hear a news article on the radio about that the legislature has passed a bill that caps the copay for insulin, for example. They don't mention the bill number. They give you a little information about it. There might be a quote from the sponsor. Well, that sponsor's name could be useful. That might help you find the bill. So you might, depending on your state website, it might be pretty easy to find this bill, searching for insulin. But I'm going to show you why that's not always the case, and that it really depends on the state. And to be honest, finding the bill text is not always going to give you enough information to know what the bill actually does and who it affects. A lot of times you're looking for additional contacts, you're looking for background information, you're looking for a plain English summary of what this bill does, and you're not always going to find it on a legislative website. So let me, I just want to go ahead and do a search for you. I'm going to show my home state. The Kentucky legislative website is not the best, but I'm going to show you how I would think a regular person who isn't completely familiar with this page would search for. And I'm going to use this example of the insulin code. So I'm on this page and I'm looking for a bill. I'm going to click on bill and then find a bill. That's what I want. I want to find a bill. Okay, so first I need to know that I need to switch this back to the 2021 session. And then I realized that the only thing I can search for is a bill number. I don't have a bill number. So I'm going to go back and I'm going to say, okay, well, now I'm going to look at this session. I'm going to see if I can find it in here. And so this is a lot of information. And again, I don't really know where to go. I do know that it was signed into law. So maybe I would think to look here that it was passed and signed into law. Well, this is just not helpful at all. Because you're not going to click on all of these bill numbers to see what the bill is. I mean, this is just crazy. So again, I'm going to go back. So there's just, I'm not seeing an easy way to figure this out on this page. So this is where this is where Google search is just, you're trying to find a news source that mentions the bill number. And sometimes they do and sometimes you don't. And so I'm getting lucky here. We can see that this is HB 95. So now at least I have a bill number. And I can go back to that list of all the laws that I found. And I can click on HB 95. So now I finally found the bill. And you can, you know, you've got this information and I want to read the text. So here is the final version. And you've got, you know, they show you what has changed in this, what's been added and what's been deleted. And so you can see that this is fairly clear that cost sharing for an insulin drug should not exceed $30 for 30 days. And then you get kind of some of these other clauses that to be honest, I'm not exactly sure what they mean. And they kind of appear throughout the bill. So this is where I'm looking for a summary. I want to know what this bill does in plain English. And you can see that the summary says right here, summary of original version. Well, was it amended? You know, I don't, I don't really know that. Also, you know, I can see here that these are the amendments here. But, you know, so this summary does not apply to the amendments. And so you can, you know, you really have to do a lot of work here to figure out what amendments were passed and what are the fiscal statements. You can also see like when you click on this fiscal statement. You know, I don't know. I can see the date is 21221. But now I'm going to have to go back and see it was that before. So this is just not providing me an easy way of getting a plain English summary of what this bill does for the final version. And so I want to, I want to be fair to Kentucky. I have, you can, if you were to click this search, you can, no, it's not going to work for me. You can, if you were to know, you could switch to legislative record and you could search for insulin, but it doesn't ever bring up the bill page that we were just on. It does bring up the text of this, of the bill and you can then go back to get to 1995. But I would argue that most people who are looking for information on school are not going to know to go over here to this to search the legislative record. I just want to compare this to another state that passed a similar bill. So I'm, I'm on the Michigan legislative page. I'm on the main page. I can see that I can search by bill number or I can search the content. So I'm just going to search for insulin. And look, here it is, limit the amount of the copay for prescription insulin. I mean, how much easier was that than what I did in Kentucky? And you can see here that they have, you know, summaries, but they tell you clearly what the summary is on. So like here's the summary is introduced and here's the summary as it was reported by committee. And so if it had been amended on the house floor, there would be another one here that says summary has passed by the house, for example. And when you look at this, you can see in contrast to what we didn't have in Kentucky, which is what I called a plain English. I don't know why. Let's see. It's not, I'm not sure why it is not opening for me here. So you can see that this is what I would call a plain English summary. You can see that it is not written in legislative language. For the most part, you can see that they also tell you who supported this bill in the committee and who opposed it, who testified against it. This is really useful information. You know, you can see that it was supported by the American Diabetes Association, the ARP, you can see that it was opposed by the Association of Health Plans and some individual health plans. And so when I'm here, we've already found a pretty good summary. But from here, I'm looking for more context and background. And so one of the ways I could do that is it was the American Diabetes Association, Michigan. And then there's the bill number. I'm just going to plug all that in. And what I'm looking for is I'm trying to see if they have their testimony given or you can see that they have like, you know, this is a call to their they're asking their members to email, you know, what it would do. You can also another thing you could do to get more information is look for the sponsor of the bill. This was her last name. I'm looking here to see if they have if there's news articles about this. Also if she put out a press statement when it passed, legislators want to get credit when their bills pass, pass their chambers. You can see that we're getting some information, we're getting some news articles on this. So again, this is, you know, going to provide more background and context on what this bill actually does, why she introduced it. This, you know, we might also get some articles about who here's a speech she made on it. Like, you can get a lot of information there about why she was, you know, what her motivations are. And then also, you know, sometimes you'll see, trying to find an article that, you know, kind of summarizes who's opposed to it as well. So those are, you know, really great to look for things like that. Other things that you can be looking for. I'm going to show some examples of, let's get back to you. Because I see some people are talking about this in chat, and I have not forgotten about some other ways to get information. So what I'm looking for when I'm trying to find context and background to help me understand what a bill does. I'm looking one for a plain English summary, that's so helpful. I'm going to run news searches. I'm going to look for the bill title, the number, the sponsor. You can't just search for the bill number because some of these articles won't include it, and then you'll miss them. I'm going to be looking for press releases from the sponsor. I'm going to be looking for press releases from organizations that either support or oppose the bill. And another thing that some states have, I'm going to show, I call this kind of like my advanced legislative sites. Let's see here. I'm going to go and show you in Florida. Florida has, because they have really strong sunshine laws, they have a lot of kind of great features on their website. And one of the things, let's say, I'm going to search for, I'm going to look for bills. I'm going to look for the bill that they pass about riders, among other things allows people to drive into them. But so here's this bill, HP1 combating public disorder. And in addition to the bill text, all the amendments, you can see that they've got some, they have some serious staff analysis, like here's the final house version of this analysis. Like look at this is very plain English of a complicated bill with background, why they passed it. They've got citations to news articles. I mean, this is an 18 page summary of a bill that I don't even know that the bill is 18 pages, I'm not sure. But the other thing I wanted to show from in Florida is that they make available videos of committee hearings. And so it was, it was on the House and the Judiciary Committee on March 10. And if you scroll here, you can see that here's their on demand video archive. And when you click on March 10, here is the video we could sit and watch this hearing for three hours and see all the people who testified for and against it. We could see what the legislators said about it. We could see the votes. You know, that doesn't, this is not something they did just because of COVID. This is something that they have been doing for quite a while. And, you know, another just to just to show again the advantage Arizona is another legislative page that has a great, has a great website. There's a bill that deals with whether people convicted of animal cruelty and bestiality and other offenses can own an animal for, can't own an animal for a certain amount of time. But if you, you know, you're searching for this bill, you just can start typing and you can see that they've got, you know, various, various bills here. And the one I'm looking for is this 2483. But I just wanted to show you the, what they're like, what a great plain English summary looks like. They've got videos. I don't, there probably aren't a lot of videos of this because it wasn't a bill that even made the news. So I'm not sure it had a full hearing, but you can see that here is the summary as passed by the house. And you can see that this, the bill, you know, this is, they have an overview of the bill, the history, the provisions of the bill, what the bill, what the bill actually does. And so this is just the difference between, you know, this is the difference between a state like Kentucky that, you know, has a lot of this information, but it's not very easy to find and states like Arizona and Florida that have made a clear effort to make it easy for non legislative experts to find, to find information. And so let's get back to, I'm just going to, I'm going to quickly check just to make sure that I don't, I don't think I have any questions. I think the chat is going on fine without me. So yeah, so, you know, I've talked a little bit about the differences between legislative websites and how, depending on what state you're searching, the ease of finding information varies. I want to talk a little bit about some sites that are alternatives to searching an individual state legislative website. And there's several of these, I'm just going to mention a couple. These are sites that aggregate legislative information from all 50 states. They do like data downloads every night from the legislative pages. And then they put them into their own format and their own features. And so this can be great if you're searching for information for a state that makes it hard to search keywords like Kentucky. It can also be great if you're searching across states. So if you're looking, you know, if I wanted to find out how many states passed in Flynn copay bills this year, these are the sites I would go to. They're of course paid sites that are great at this like state net. I'm not going to talk about those because these are free or at least the portions that I'm going to show today are free. Bill track 50 does require registration, but it's free for what I'm going to show. And these sites are very similar. I think they each have pros and cons. And so depending on what I'm using it for, I might choose one or another, but let me, I'm going to go and close some of these. I'm just going to show open states first. Open states is completely free. They don't, they're not selling anything. There's not like a paid portion of this. You can search one state or you can search all the states. So for example, if I wanted, if I was looking for that Kentucky insulin bill, I mean, honestly, I would have found it faster searching here than on the website. So I'm just going to type in insulin and you can see like, look how fast I found it right here. Here's the bill. And they, you know, have their own kind of overlay of this information that they're getting directly from the Kentucky website. And, you know, they have the actions here and then you can also get the bill taxed. And what's good is it sends you directly to the PDF from the Kentucky legislature so you can see how they, how they do it, how they indicate the changes. You can also, instead of just looking in Kentucky, you can search all the states. So if I wanted to search for insulin copay, I will get a list of relevant bills. You know, you can see that they found 281 bills. Now these are not all going to be exactly what I want. They're not all going to have passed. Some of these are dead or some of these have passed. Like this is an appropriations bill. There may or may not be something about copays in this large bill. But this is a way to, you know, try to see if you can pick out the other states. Like, so here's clearly this Rhode Island one is clearly exactly what I'm looking for. So prescription drug benefits copayment. It's not perfect because you know what, you also need to search it for copay with a hyphen because you get different bills. So, but it is a good way to search all the 50 states at once. Legiscan, that's another one. It is similar and you can, let's see, I'm covering. So I'm going to, I don't want to do bill tracking. I want to do bill searching. But again, you can search by one state. You can search all states. This, this shows you, you know, this is a different way of, you know, the results. And it does, it is clear what bills have passed and which bills are still pending. But another, another good way. One thing I really like about Legiscan is they do show you that the top 50 national searches, like for the last day or so. And so sometimes it's just interesting to see what people are searching for. And finally, the other one is bill track. It is, this is the one where you need to, to log in. Let's see, odds that I got that on my first. Okay. But again, all states, like we can search for insulin and copay. Legiscan, I forgot to show it, but it does not take you directly to the, like the, the authoritative text of the bill. It has it in HTML. So it's a little hard to read. This one has, is a little bit easier in that it doesn't give you the text that way, but it does send you directly to this official bill page, which is useful. And so just the last thing I want to cover is that if you're not looking for an individual bill, but you're more searching for policy areas, you know, you don't, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. There are other organizations that are doing this type of research. And, and if you can find something that's already been done, you can save yourself lots of time. I'm going to show two of the organizations that I worked for. But just to give you an idea of the types of things you can find NCSL, the National Conference of State Legislatures has been slow for me today. While I'm waiting for that to come up, I will talk about the Council of State Governments and the Book of the States. I hope people are familiar with this, with this site. There is a, see that I'm not doing anything fancy to get to any of these, but I have, the links are in the slides. There are two things going on with Book of the States. First is I wanted to show you like the 2020, the before 2020, and this is what I worked on when I was there, is getting all of the, the Book of the States into the CSU Knowledge Center. And you can see that each of the individual chapters with information is, is available to be downloaded in Excel or PDF. And so the 2020 book isn't in here yet, but I just wanted to show you just an example. Like here are the election tables. These are the tables I used to work on when I was there. These take so much longer than you'd think to compile, but you know, if you're looking for the preeminent reference guide to state legislatures and state government, like really Book of the States, which is 100% freely available online is the way to go. This is the 2020 version, but you know, like this table, like the election dates, this would take me like two weeks to put together. And you would not think it was that difficult, but even like polling hours. And then these are the tables that we have to update the most, you know, about voter registration requirements. And then we added this table, why I was there, about how people vote, because we started to get the vote by mail states and other things. I can't imagine what this is going to look like in the next edition and how many footnotes and other things are going to be in here for the changes. But yeah, so this, the Book of the States, it's really a great, I had it up. This is the most recent version. They have it in issue right now. And I'm not sure why it hasn't been kind of broken down into the various tables, but you can see that like in the table of contents, I'll just try to make this bigger for you. You can see that it's state finance, the judicial branch, elections, constitutions, executive legislative branch, if you're looking for things on legislative salaries, that's all, it's all in this, it's all in this book. So consider this a plug for the Book of the States. Come on, NCSL. I don't know if it's down. We will try one other browser real quick, but what I wanted just to talk about with NCSL is that they have a lot of policy staff who do who write reports and write policy briefs about things, and it doesn't look like I'm going to be able to show this to you, but it has, I'll just tell you about it. So like on the home page right now, they have a link to a survey of chats going nuts. Just make sure there's nothing. Yeah, some, okay, so it's not just me. Okay, so they have a bill database highlighted on their main page right now that is on security breach legislation and goes through and talks about all the different bills that were introduced this year and passed on various aspects of it. They also have a news article about, let's see, it was about police reform legislation that highlighted what states have passed what, and they also, what I really wanted to show you was they have a, they have 50 state tracking databases on different topics under the research tab, and so, which is powered by state net, which is great if you don't have this exception to state net, but for example, if I were showing it to you, I would show you that you went to prescription drugs, and there was a cost sharing one, and it would bring up a list of all the bills, you could filter it by year, you could filter it by bills that have passed, you could add a keyword search, so I added insulin, and so it's really great if the, if the, or if what you're interested in is being covered by the NCSL 50 state bill tracking, I really recommend doing that, and I'm sorry, I'm just, it's, it's coming, look at this, okay, so I just want to show the, let's see if it can come up, but bill tracking, yes, look at this, so here's the security breach legislation I was talking about, and here is the, let's see, research, yeah, so this is what the page looks like, here are all the tracking databases, I mentioned that I looked under, I was in prescription drugs, and then it, you had all these different things you could search for, so I limited it to cost sharing, I did all states, I did only ones that were adopted in this year, and I'll do insulin, and then this is by far, you know, the best of the search results that we've had, oh, and of course now I got nothing, but I had this, well that will, we'll take out a, we'll be enacted instead, that's what I meant, yes, so here you go, so here you can see that these are the states that have passed an insulin copay bill this year, if we took away the enacted, and just saw all of them, you'd see the bills that were, you know, how many bills were introduced, so this is a really great site, I use it all the time, and then this is the last thing I wanted to show was just, hopefully people are familiar with Stateline, which is probably one of the best news sources for covering state government, it's done by Pew, and it is, it has its own original reporting, and also links to newspapers in the states, and so it's a great way to kind of see what are the major state-focused stories in the country, and also what is happening in the states, you know, where you can see like, you know, from the Denver Post or the Las Vegas Sun, you can see what the declining, there, you know, while the numbers are declining, I have great respect and admiration for all of the, exists for the current state house reporters, and they're doing great work on very limited funds, and so these stories show up here in Stateline, so I'm sorry for the technical difficulties here, I'm going to stop sharing and I'm happy to answer any questions that people have, let's see, we have, let's see, I have a question from a patron who wants to find, you know, those records of debates in those states, they probably, I would think they would exist in print at the legislative library for, in those states, I wouldn't be surprised if they're not digitized, but I would contact the legislative libraries, and to see if they have the published record of, from those time periods, that's where I would start, you know, to see, you know, because the legislative library, you know, I think, I don't know if it's just me, but I always wait too long before I pick up the phone and call, I'm always trying to find it on my own, searching the internet, and then I pick up the phone and I call the Kentucky LRC or other places, and they have an answer for me right away, so that's what, that's what I would, that's where I would start, and I've also seen that we've got, yeah, I've seen the state legislative history guide, it's great, thank you for sharing that. Awesome, thank you so much, Jennifer. Yeah, and somebody else suggested how to do it, maybe looking there in an internet archive too, but I think that there is some state legislative historical material, potentially, that you might find, but just like you were saying, it depends on where not states digitizing the older materials. There's a question in the Q&A, I just want to just, I can read it though. Any suggestions for those who want to start being a citizen journalist? In terms of covering state legislatures, I mean, I think that the more people who are writing and reporting on what state legislatures are doing is fantastic, I mean really, the days of like the old grizzled state house reporter who'd been there for 50 years, like that is really coming to an end. The people who are covering state houses right now are often right out of college and not paid very much, they don't stay very long, so anyone who is, you know, is going to be willing to pay attention to what legislatures are doing and to make other people aware of it can only help, you know, bring transparency to state government actions, in my opinion. Yeah, I saw some, I saw something somewhere that Arizona, like downsized their press room because they only had six reporters regularly attending sessions. Wow. I mean, that's, you know, and in some states, it's literally like the AP and maybe one paper, like really, there's, you know, very little television coverage, there's very little newspaper coverage, you know, maybe the paper in the capital itself still has a state house reporter, but some states are relying solely on AP. It looks like Natalie, or Natalia Brant, may have a question. Oh, if you wanted to, we could, oh, she lowered her hand. Oh, no, you're fine. You're going to make that happen. I found it, one thing I just wanted, while people are chatting, one of the things I wanted to mention is how it was fascinating when you showed Kentucky's because that's exactly the North Carolina interface. So they must be using the same platform, which that's the same problems with the North Carolina interface is that it's just, it's built for people who know how to use it, but not the general public or anybody's section. But it was really, it's, it's exactly the same layout. Everything is exactly the same. Yeah, the sad thing is, is that they had a new rollout of a new website, like two years ago with the great fanfare, and it didn't fix any problems. And so yeah, one of my research, one of my research areas, and I'm really just getting started on it is trying to compare state legislative websites on how easy they are for like regular people to navigate and find information. And it really does vary so much between the states like Kentucky and apparently North Carolina. And then, you know, when you go to a state that's doing it well, you notice and that's Arizona and Florida to, you know, really, really good ones. You know, when you can find, you know, videos of sub of committee hearings or directly on the bill page, like that's a great, that's a great element. So there's another Kobe Connery was asking how much of your job now is doing legislative research? Practically zero. You know, other than this is my like, my area of like professional research, you know, I do handle all the questions we get from people who are doing state legislative research, but it's not a lot. I would love to do more because it's clearly something I, you know, know a lot about and have a lot of experience in. So I do try to help out all of my colleagues in the library with different programs, like I've done instruction, for example, in public health, for helping public health students figure out how to find legislative information, trying to help Medcent medical students find bill information. It really does go across all the different disciplines. So I would like to be able to do more. But, you know, I don't know that the interest in state legislative research is as high as, as I would argue, it should be based on how important it is to your daily life. Yeah, definitely. There's one more question. So Barbara was asking, are the aggregators comprehensive, or would you recommend also searching the state's legislative websites? They're comprehensive in that they're doing, they're using an API to get all of the information from the website. So I would check to see how often it's updated, whether it's updated every day or if it's not every day. You know, most of them let you know how often they are updated. You know, really, it's just different ways of searching. You know, sometimes, you know, I would never just use one if I was trying to know if, if I was trying to write an article, for example, about how many states have lowered co-pays on insulin. I would not just search one. I'd be searching multiple. I'd be searching news stories. I'd be searching news databases. I'd be doing all sorts of different things because they just, it's just, it's very different. Like I said, the co-pay versus co-pay with a hyphen made a difference in my search. So you really do need to, you know, like I said, act like a detective and kind of come at this from lots of different ways. And then, yeah, definitely. And Jennifer's question, I think, is there an easy way to figure out whether or not the topic makes more sense at the federal level or the state level versus maybe the local level? Interesting question. Yeah, I mean, it is because it, you know, you like to think that there's this hard and fast delineation between federal and state and local laws and it, there really isn't, you know, as we could see from the abortion, the voting rights, the police reform are all things being handled at all three levels really because local governments are, I saw an article today that city in Ohio has banned abortion clinics from its boundaries. Like that, you know, it's, all these things are happening at all three levels. And so, you know, other than the obvious things with like the interstate commerce aspect that are clearly resigned, you know, for the federal government, like you really do need to be checking lots of different, I mean, definitely, there are very few things that state governments are not, are not putting their hands in, you know, interstate commerce, they're even trying that, but like, they're maybe not declaring war right now, but I, you know, that's probably coming. Michael is suggesting Dave Daley, his work. He's wondering if you're familiar with it. He wrote a couple of books related to elections. It looks like, I don't know if you're familiar with his work. Yeah, and another book of the States used to have articles in it and not just and that went away a couple years ago. I was disappointed about it because I think the articles provided a lot of context for what was going on that year in the state legislatures, but also you got to see the names of the people who were experts in the various areas. So you could, you know, because we'd have people from NCSL write for us. We'd have, you know, academic researchers write for book of the States. So that's another way to kind of become familiar with the people who are writing in this and researching in this field. It's also the people who write, you know, I'm always, you know, I recognize so many names of people who work at NCSL who are like their election expert, you know, they're the person on this issue. So yeah, there's lots of great places to find experts in areas. It's not a, it's not a huge field. So you see the same names over and over again. Oh, right. So I'm thinking more, just thinking of the CQ weekly CQ researcher style thing, but that's so focused on the federal. There's not really something that exists in the same way. Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, state line, like I said, is a great place to see, because they've just got people focused on the state level. So you can see what issues they're covering. And sometimes you can have some great ideas from that about like what are things that are trending. But it's, yeah, there's definitely not as much attention as we spend on, you know, Congress and what they're doing or not doing. And also, you know, elections, it's all presidential turnout. And, you know, people, you know, the down ballot races get so little attention. And really, they're so important to people's daily life that I wish people were much more focused on what state legislatures were doing and how it affects you, how it affects your life much more so than, like I said, Congress has passed 15 bills so far this year. Yeah, no, that's again, that's awesome. Yeah, very important point. It's a great point for us to stop. I wish I had watched this webinar when I was a first year librarian because I just wandered around until I found the book of the states. So when I got asked a tough question my first couple of months in, so yeah, I proposed it is that one of my fellow librarians, there was a question from a student who was trying to find a Kentucky bill related to teachers. He was like, I can't find it. This is stupid. Why can't I search? I was like, oh, you can't do it there. And I, you know, started googling and I was trying to find the Kentucky Education Association because I knew that they'd be opposed to it and would have the bill number. And he said, how do you know how to do this? Yeah, I did this for 20 years. And then it kind of was the light bulb that other people, you know, might not have thought about the different ways to find state legislative information. Yeah, no, very helpful. Thank you very much. And was there any final questions? You're hitting the end of our time. Thank you so much, Jennifer. This was fantastic. We thank you everybody for coming. We had a great group today. I will say thank you, Michigan, for having a great website, even though it hurts me to my bucky soul. But yes, thank you. We will be back in September. Hope to see everyone then. Well, actually, we'll see everybody at Godort events this summer, hopefully in June. And then in September, we'll see you all back. So yes, thank you and have a great week. Rest of your weekend, weekend, everyone. Thanks so much. Thank you.