 Hi and welcome to the NCLA government resources section help I'm an accidental government information librarian webinar series. Rich gauze is the government information librarian for the university libraries at the University of Central Florida and has coordinated establishing the centers of excellence at UCF for information from the US Department of Energy, Atomic Energy Commission, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Thank you very much Rich for joining us today. So my name is Rich gauze I am at University of Central Florida and I'm going to go through kind of a whirlwind in terms of resources mostly an awareness of what's out there and the link that you're seeing on the screen for the Florida government information research tips is the only link you need to record in terms of getting back to the resources. I am in the process of adding a listing of every resource that's in the webinar to that page. So as I flip past the screen you don't have to worry about trying to capture the URLs that are shown and the titles of certain works because that'll be there. So where do we start searching? Well a lot of people are going to search their their favorites in terms of and if you know what you're looking for I think that's one of the things a lot of times just knowing what to look for then you can just go to Google or Bing or Wikipedia or some other source. These are three of the sources I would go to probably next and I'm going to go into more detail on each of them. MyFlorida is the MyFlorida.com is the official state of Florida website. The state library of Florida online catalog has a tremendous amount of resources and then the shared academic catalog for the state universities and state colleges of Florida to be the next place I would look and I'll touch on a couple of key dates that have an impact when you're looking for Florida government information throughout the presentation and we'll hit each of these as we go through. Before we're a state we were territory so you're not going to find state government information if we were in a state but you may be looking for Florida information from the earlier period and really want to start out in terms of looking at the levels of government as to what type of information and the information sources that you're going to look at. I will often start if I'm looking for information about the state of Florida I'm very likely going to be in federal databases and publications instead of looking at its state of Florida. The federal resources may be easier to find and maybe a little bit more stable and if I'm looking for information at the level of Florida rather than counties and cities and that type of information but I probably wanted to compare that data with other states and so the federal resources likely to give me that data from a common source to review. Also there are a number of publications that may have been produced jointly by a federal and state agency for example the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Florida DOT or the USGS and the Florida Geological Survey. Also I'll look at federal publications because they may cite state publications and now that I know which state publication I'm looking for I can search on Google or other sources or in state resources for that specific publication. I'd also go to federal resources I'm looking for Florida when it was a territory because I'll be looking for example the territory papers of U.S. which many of you may have volumes 22 through 26 come in the Florida territory and the similar wars which overlap the 1845 Florida becoming a state and maybe looking at federal material there both in terms of the war department or in terms of Indian affairs. If I'm looking below the state level at counties and sub areas be aware that there's 67 counties in Florida and you get that to I'd also be looking for smaller areas and probably looking at the federal resources for example the census. You also have the counties grouped into 20 metropolitan statistical areas for the urban areas. You can do sub counties there's 316 county subdivisions for example my home county of Orange County has six subdivisions in the federal resources for the census and you can look at places but place boundaries tend to change over time a city may grow or shrink it may cease to exist there are 411 incorporated places in the state of Florida plus another 509 other places that are clearly identified but they're not incorporated so if we go back in time in terms of looking at material in Florida go back all the way to the Spanish period you had east Florida and west Florida you had st. Augustine or the east side and you had Pensacola out almost into Alabama and that's really where you start growing from there we started out with the Scambia County and St. John's County were the two first counties in Florida representing the west part of the state and the east part of the state as we approach here's 1830 in terms of looking at the county boundaries this is overlaying in the dark lines what the the county boundaries were at that time and really the state of Florida was the the pan have between there between Pensacola and and St. Augustine because you didn't have mosquito control air conditioning the lower part of the state wasn't really developed in fact you'll notice that Mosquito County was the name for the county that I currently reside in which is now Orange County by 1925 the county boundaries had stabilized and so I generally use county boundaries when I'm looking for most information at the sub-state level 1920 is shown here at the very last of the changes in county boundaries took place in 1925 there have been minor changes since then if a river is the boundary between two counties you may find that it shifted a little bit but I'm not going to really worry about that. Jade County is now Miami Jade County that one point like 20 years ago there was a bill proposed to split Monroe County into the keys and it's two counties the keys and then the mainland part of the county but nothing ever happened with that. There have been proposals over time one of the things my my I grew up in Brainton over in Manatee County and there was a proposal from Sarasah Lentage Flagers to change the county boundary by about 150 feet I believe because a subdivision had a new section that was overlapping into Manatee County and it almost went through but the state legislators from Manatee County suddenly realized that really what was up was that the county boundaries shifting 150 feet to the north would mean that the Sarasah to Brainton Airport which is right on the county line all the runways and all the noise from air travel would still be in Manatee County but the terminal building would now be entirely in Sarasah County and all the tax revenue would go to Sarasah County from all the flights at the airport so that didn't go anywhere either. There's also sub areas within the state in terms of counties a couple of different regional areas within the state that are state functions but they're not under a state agency directly in some cases and then there are sub areas for state agencies and then the court system and one of the problems you'll encounter is that these make these are groupings of counties to make up these districts, councils, regions but none of the agencies as far as I can tell uses the same division of counties so if you're looking for two or three counties that are near each other you may have to go to different regions to pull the data for them. For example the farter regional planning council divides up the state very clearly and if you want to pick I'm going to go over a series of maps if you want to take a look at the area in peak the Tampa Bay area, Polk Hillsborough Manatee County and just sort of try and track how that changes as we move from area to area to see that the local health councils actually split that up into three different overlapping into three different areas. In environmental protection the water management districts actually there's five water management districts in Florida and these are the ones that don't conform to county boundaries they're based on the watersheds so you'll see the one that's highlighted in blue is the area that flows down through the Kissimmee River down into the Everglades. The northwest Florida water management district up in the Panhandle is the area flowing out of Alabama and Georgia the rivers that flow down here actually the Appalachicola River that flows down into the Gulf actually starts as the Calusa Hatchey River up very near the North Carolina border and flows all the way down around Atlanta and down to Florida. The State Department of Environmental Protection, the water management district, the State Department of Environmental Protection are linked fairly closely but they have different district arrangements of those county boundaries how they get grouped. State Department of Transportation is decentralized and they have transportation districts and again they're grouped differently. State Division of Emergency Management deals with hurricanes and fires and all those sorts of things that we might worry about again groups them differently so here you can see all those maps sort of side by side and you'll see that comparing them one map to another that none of the counties are grouped quite the same with any one map so this is just heads up if you're looking for Florida information that you may have to look in different groupings to find that county level data. Court system in Florida the same thing the five district courts that are the appellate courts in Florida each of them is subdivided into circuit courts which are also subdivided into county courts but this is the difference from the federal system to the state of Florida system in the federal system the district courts are the trial courts the smaller courts and the circuit courts are the appellate courts in Florida the circuit courts are the trial courts and the county courts and then the district courts are the appellate courts so getting back to one of the places I would say start the myflorida.com website gives you the really a good starting point for most people to try to locate information about Florida. I broke out the tabs the tabs are the top left visitor Florida veridian business government here's sort of a breakout of how those list and group information for folks and so depending on what type of information you're looking for they give you a good start to trying to find information in the top corner of that myflorida page there's a fighting agency tab and that opens to this page which is if you know that you're looking for particular type of information this actually is a directory of the Florida agencies you'll see the environmental protection in the top middle of that column and I'm going to come back to that just a moment this is the lower part of that page so if you were looking for example the water management districts or the regional planning councils this provides you with those links I says we'll go back to the department of environmental protection so here we are on the page I've dropped down the division listing and we're going to go to the Florida geological survey in just a moment but I want to scroll down to the very bottom of their main page where they have a document resource hub where you can actually search for documents so if you know which agency you're looking for publications from you may find they've got a specialized tool they actually have a couple of specialized tools at the DEP for locating documents and publications from that agency if we go to the Florida geological survey page they have a link for FGS publications you go to that you've got a downloadable list of the FGS publications as a PDF which they update about once a year there's also an online list but I'd recommend the downloadable list because there you're going to find about 80 pages of information listing all the publications even those that have not moved online yet although many almost all of them have at this point and then the individual pages there they give you information in terms of ordering you sometimes you'll find pricing but they have the links to the PDFs of the actual publications right there in the document on the right page you'll see the open file that series there's a bunch of them that don't have links that's because there's a general link at the top of that column that will provide you all of those geological maps in one place going back to the my Florida page there's a tab at the top for the forward one directory which is the directory for the state of Florida including the state information center if you're trying to find you can't figure out who to contact but you'll notice the left hand side you can look by agency by county you can actually look by employee if they're listed by the schools and the university settings the other thing I'll point out there is the email dating standards link I've done the drop down for citrus county or for the department of citrus rather and if you found in some other format in a bibliography or from presentation somewhere you found the name of an individual but you don't have their you actually have their name but you don't have their email address this will show you how for that specific agency email addresses are constructed so you can give that a try if you can't find them listed someplace the second place I was identified was the state library of Florida and for state publications this is going to be the main source if you you're not finding it elsewhere this is a great starting place the state library of Florida online catalog if we click I'm gonna come back to this page several times when we click on state publications in that where I've got the red air reporting we land on this page and this is we'll come back to this page again in a moment but this will let you search the catalog and it is presetting the search requirements to limiting to the state publications collection I did the search there for division of administrative hearings and your report and pulled up a listing for it including the where they've got digital copies the electronic resource list and this word they've got the links to the individual digitized publications now this Florida public documents collection that state library maintains you sort of have to go through the library catalog to get to the individual publications going back to the state library of Florida catalog page we'll click on the Florida information finder where the arrow is pointing and this gives you a lot of ways to find information about Florida by different topic areas I'm going to look at the A to Z index here and this will actually you can just work your way through a menu that will help you locate information from this A to Z list it'd be very helpful try to just sort of browse through find oh that's what I was looking for going back to the state library catalog page the state library provides a lot of services specifically for state employees and if you're looking to state catalog what you have to do is you have to know what you're looking for pretty much you can do a search of my keyword there's double ways to search it but if you don't know that something exists you don't know how to search it they put together these state agency portals that include a lot of subscription services so they can be good for identifying information but you may not find that you have access because you're not an employee in the state of Florida but navigating through their pages one things they've got are the state agency information lib guides basically the resource guides that they put together on their site and scroll down into the agriculture guide noting that they're listing various publications and they've got links to the electronic versions of those I'm noting that the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and report they've actually got it digitally available back to 1890 again in the Florida Public Documents Collection so you got these links to get to the old reports but you wouldn't necessarily have known to look for them if you didn't know that they existed or what the titles were back to the state library catalog page and we're going to go to the classic catalog which is the older version to look at one resource that I've very useful the Florida Biography and Citation Index is essentially the references from their vertical file at the state library about Florida I do a search here for Henry Flagler and I find an entry for him I select that entry and that's great we've got his birth and death date but there's not a whole lot of information here you need to look inside this record and you don't look at the a look inside you look click on the catalog record to look inside this and what they've got is citations to various books and articles to go look for it and you'll really have to go look and see if you can you find access to these or interlibrary load them but this does give you a lot of information that's really useful in terms of looking for information about Florida and particularly about people in Florida people looking for information about Florida don't really care whether it's published publications information that the state library maintains or state records that are unpublished Florida documents that are maintained by the state archives but they are separate catalogs for looking for that information the state archives catalog is fairly powerful but I find it to be fairly finicky when you're doing searches by keyword to try and locate material I've got the results here from searching for John's committee and I needed to put that in quotes because otherwise it looked for John's or committee I got several hundred results by putting it as a phrase by putting in quotes I actually limited to just those entries that had that the trick here is you need to click a little number on the left hand side it does say click on a number below for a detailed description most people don't see that and don't realize that that number is actually providing you with the detailed information about that the John's committee was Florida's version of the McCarthy un-American activities committee that took place at the federal level they were looking for at communists subversives in about the second half of it it really focused exclusively on trying to route out homosexuals in Florida in government agencies and in the university system on this page one of things you'll see is that little folder is also clickable and that actually will list you several pages of the individual folders that exist in the state archives of transcripts of the interviews all the different types of information that was collected going back to the state archives catalog the advanced search screen is really useful in terms of helping you understand how to do an effective search they give you examples for how to fill in the information on these search forms these tips at the bottom in terms of searching I also found that the browse indexes so you're searching a catalog and you don't know that stuff exists you don't know what terms to put in and so the computer gives you back what you told it to look for the browse indexes feature actually allows you to browse by subject terms or by person's names right then we go back to the previous screen you notice down at the bottom subject access fields that actually lists terms that you could use in the catalog for doing searches so I pull up this entry browsing beginning with Flagler to look for Henry Flagler again and actually find six entries that are resources in the collection the it's something you wouldn't necessarily know to look at without digging into them the farter keys overseas railway in terms of great rare roads to fire that makes sense and the Key West railroad bridge construction photographs that might make sense but you have to drill into these files to really discover what's in them back to that state publications depository program page we're going to take a look at the collection policy the quarterly publication reports and the list of foreign depository libraries so this identifies what the state depository program which has been going since 1967 for distributing publications around the state of Florida that are received by the state library if they don't get enough copies to distribute they only have them at the state library but otherwise they will distribute it to the various libraries currently there's about 20 state depository libraries scattered around the state so this tells you what they do collect and then what they do not collect things that will not be available in their material you might find them in the state archives collection this is the public documents distribution list basically they've got it digitized back to 1998 and so this will actually list what was distributed to the libraries in that year the recent ones give you actually quarterly updates or the annual accumulations pull that all together here's the example from the last quarter of 2016 and you'll find the listings and they will actually give you a link to the individual publications as to where they exist on the state server just going back to the 1998 version where they broke out monographs in one section and serial publications in the later section and they interweave the things that were distributed and the things that were not distributed here's the fourth one down has the quick number listing and that's a classification similar to the su doc system it was created by Peggy Walker way back when she's retired 20 almost 20 years ago and a number of state depositories have adopted that we use that here at my university and so we're able to actually locate the documents by the agency that issued them and actually going back to the Florida public documents the first print version of the Florida public documents distribution and back then the first pages were all on white paper and were the things that were being distributed to you and at the back of the volume there was usually about the last quarter of the volume was on usually blue paper and these are the things they didn't get enough copies to send out to the depository libraries so these are the listings of things that were only available at the state library so this shows you the current distribution of the state depository libraries around the state so someone that's looking for a particular publication hopefully will be able to find a copy of it in one of these libraries that's switching over to searching the Florida academic libraries and you'll see that the 40 academic libraries public academic libraries in the state this will identify the 12 state universities which are the ones that have the outlined lettering and the 28 state colleges former community colleges in the state and so there's a joint catalog that you can search all of those at once and I would go here to search I'm going to search for the Florida visitor study as an example and I found six listings I'm going to open the first listing it shows me those locations at various in this case all but one of these is one of the state universities you'll notice some of them have that for example cod.e1 that FIU does that's that state depository system that was developed at Florida Atlantic University and I will necessarily have all of my collection Florida documents the historical documents may not be cataloged but if I find the listing here I can use the call number for one of those other universities and locate my copy probably under the same number since we've adopted that common system if I check availability you'll see FSU has it up through 2011 you'll find most of the libraries stop at 1996 in terms of their coverage you will see down at the bottom that UCF we we have our Florida documents collection through 96 and then our rosin campus we have 2001 through 2015 that's our hospitality school and so they made a point of picking up the later publications so if you question well why don't we have the later publications in the state library collection the state documents well we look here at the Florida visitor study at the state library listing and they've got 1981 through 2012 so we actually had more recent ones available in the state universities and they only have the 2012 edition electronically so what's happening here in terms of why are the others available I go back to the state university library catalog what I'll see is a link actually to the earlier version of Florida tourist study but I see a note here that says that after 1996 these were issued by the Florida tourism industry marketing corporation so what happened was in 1996 the the Florida Department of Commerce was abolished and their functions were largely privatized quasi-government agency and so they created the Florida tourism industry marketing corporation which became visit Florida fairly quickly and enterprise enterprise Florida and the focus of these two organizations initially was really on a marketing side of the house and they really stopped producing publications with data for researchers and the state of Florida it was really towards bringing tourists to the state and bringing businesses to the state enterprise Florida took quite a while to actually produce data that would have been collected by the Department of Commerce the visit Florida org site is the site for their partners so here's the 2015 Florida visitor study but if you click on this you have to be logged in as a paid partner of the Visit Florida organization to actually see the documents and here you'll see a number of the other partner tools they're available to their marketing partners some really useful reports that are not available generally not available in Florida libraries and in the state depository system because they're being produced by the quasi-governmental privatized Visit Florida tourism agency it's still the official tourism function for Florida but it's no longer a state agency as such so that's visit Florida org VisitFlorida.com will is intended for tourists in terms of located beaches and places to stay and things to do in the state but there's no data about Florida presented on the commercial site so on VisitFlorida.org you had to actually be a subscribing member or their partners to get access VisitFlorida.com you don't get that data reported but they do have a media site so this VisitFlorida.com they do have extracted information from those research reports so you can find some of the data here on a publicly accessible site Enterprise Florida has a lot more information that's publicly accessible so initially they had virtually nothing when it first happened in 96 you could not get any of the reports that you used to get from the Department of Commerce but they do have a data center that actually provides quite a bit of information these days so I do recommend that if you're looking for information about businesses in Florida there's quite a bit of information there so I identify some of the digital collections where you might look for information in Florida so we already talked a little bit about the Florida public documents collection which you have to access through the Florida State Library catalog there's also the Florida memory project that's run out of the state library state archives the Palm project is actually a joint publication or joint project from universities around the state of Florida University of Florida has quite a few digital collections and then there's the Florida electronic library Florida on Florida collection so the Florida memory project has really a lot of primary source material they also have a classroom center for helping teachers use the primary source material with their students and have lesson guides lesson plans the Palm project publication of archival library and museum materials for the state universities has a number of specialized digital collections the aerial photo photography collection the Everglades digital library has a lot of federal and state resources as well as some commercial sources Florida environments online has again federal and state publications the Florida geological survey Florida heritage collection has a lot of private commercial sources as well as some state publications and Florida historical legal documents does provide ditched as copies of a lot of the early legal materials from the 1800s the Florida heritage collection you can search full text of this but I've tended to fight if you don't know what you're looking for you may get a lot of zero results for things that actually exist there because you weren't quite searching for it correctly so I have listed here some of the publications that you could actually look for and I would look for these by title so they have a number of the digital publications here from various state university digitization projects some of these are available on the state library catalog and in some cases may be a longer run of digital copies than what's found here I know the state board of health and reports there's a longer run that's available through the state library but this is one of those places to locate these the report of the board of control right now the only the 1948 through 1952 digital copies are available my university digitized the the entire run from 1916 through 1968 but in the transition to a new platform they are temporarily not visible on the site they are working to get those established the Florida advancing state was produced in 1928 and gives you a early from 1907 through 1927 snapshot of the change in Florida as it grew over those years and there were special sentences died in the state of Florida on the five-year mark and three of those are actually digitally available in the palm project there's also the Florida history and heritage collections at the University of Florida one of those is the publications of Florida National Guard we have this in my collection here's one of those that I did a copy for a print copy but these do exist digitally they're very similar Indian Wars back at the very beginning here's one of the pages out of one of those where it's the actual descriptive the muster role of the members of that particular unit and provides all sorts of interesting geological historically information interesting information about where they were born and how tall they were and what their color of complexion I had here what they occupation I know one of these was a cow driver if they brought a horse with them what the value of that horse and the horse equipment was in terms of other places to look for information besides these starting places we identified the Florida documents index is one of those developed by Florida Atlantic we're going to go through each of these are the next slides so far documents index you can search by keyword and this identified for example keyword search for women identified the specific publications and identifies which agencies were issuing those publications if I actually opened that first entry what I'll find is this holdings location at the Florida Atlantic University the AG dot B2B colon D46 slash year that's that state agency call number system that was developed at Florida Atlantic and I could use this to locate those volumes I would also search through the Florida State Library catalog that this is one other way to get to these and we're stricting here specifically to those things that were distributed as part of the depository program there's also the go to our project that Daniel Cornwall from Alaska got started and it's a lid guide maintained by ALAs go to work of state agency database listings state by state here's the listing for Florida and will provide you with links to specific database resources maintained by state agencies another place to look for government information would be the various guides that have been created by depository libraries in the state of Florida this particular page will provide you with links to a number of those guides now some of these may not focus specifically on state publications but it's another place to look and see what information they've got and if you're in the state of Florida looking you can see a guide for a university near you that might have resources for you at the University of Florida the PK young library is the historical Florida history library special collection and their holdings are included in that state university state college catalog but there are parts of their holdings that are not available there they still maintain a card catalog that has a significant amount of additional information we actually have in 1977 they created a book form of that catalog and reproduce the catalog cards 21 cards per page let's look at one of those pages it's in four oversized volumes and there are 60 over 60,000 cards from the card catalog that are reproduced in that print source and I have used it to browse for material that may no longer be showing up or may not have been included in the state catalog for the PK young collection a couple of other things that might make use of it particularly looking at the early years the surveys bibliography is a four-volume set they are very large and very comprehensive they've tried to make an effort to scour various collections wherever they can go including out of state to identify every publication that covers Florida whether it's a official publication from the state of Florida or if it's commercially produced or if it's something a congressional document also looking at the Florida handbook by Alan Morris and distinctions of these things as a search tool and newspapers so I look at this bibliography of Florida they've actually got it's arranged year by year so I'm looking right now at the 1909 year and I moved into it to the Florida pages where they start a new section called Florida official publications and they group them so normally they're reached by the author of the publication all of the Florida official publications are grouped alphabetically by the author under Florida they also have listings for the US congressional publications the Congress publications the Florida handbook was produced by commercially produced by Alan Morris started in 1947 and produced through 2012 and although it's a commercial publication it's probably one of the best ways to look at the structure of Florida government as it changes over time and give you a clue as to oh that agency is now called this in 1955 the Florida handbook is available digitally in the palm collection so you can search through the Florida handbook by title and find the digital copies of these even though it was commercially produced it has been digitized there and the problem with these is they were produced every two years and they are different from year to year extremely different in some cases and what I found is you know like the 1950s they need to have a title page or a table of contents they just launched right in but you find all sorts of really interesting information in these he would change it up every two years so you'll find pictures that lasted for several years and then they disappear and never to reappear the early volumes do have an index of the illustrations and starting a page there's about 40 pages of boards and conditions pages that break out and they provide quite a bit of detail about the history of these organizations including the whoever was in charge they give a little biographical sketch of those particular individuals I mentioned dissertations of search and I would be searching through probably our university's uh indexes commercial indexes of dissertations I want to point out here's a bibliography that was produced I think back in 1977 as well and it tried to pull together all the doctoral dissertations over a thousand doctoral dissertations that dealt with Florida and arranged them by subject areas so it is something that does exist for browsing a lot of times a dissertation or a thesis the graduate student will have researched into some of these hard to find locations of materials of publications and state records and they give you a clue as to oh that's where you'll find that particular information so just takes to be a real good clue for how to start a research process I also use newspapers a lot I would typically go into our commercial subscriptions uh for current newspapers but there are several other projects the Florida digital newspaper library from the University of Florida has digitized quite a lot of the early newspapers there's also the Google newspaper archive that does have a several newspapers around the state of Florida that do go fairly current up through 2008 I would generally use the safety times in this particular listing but they do have the Daytona beach Daytona beach paper Sarasota paper also the Crawlick America site they've got some issues mostly from that Florida digital newspaper library but other sites you can get to these things the Florida digital newspaper library again a little bit finicky in terms of searching but you can search the full text of these I pull it up here an article from the weekly newspaper from the state of Florida they are digitizing current weekly newspapers from around the state quite a bit here's the Lake City reporter and here's how we use this as a fighting tool here's talking about a particular project school district project that's being coordinated through squatty river water management districts now I know what agency is doing this they've been doing it for the past seven years I now have names of this article of specific individuals at that agency so I was trying to find more information about this project and its history and resources for it I might go to that agency directly I'm going back here to 2007 I've actually got four different aspects of state government covered in this particular issue of the paper the one that's cut off on the left is actually Governor Broward had proposed that the drain the everglades and a number of the papers had been sort of poking fun at him for this and he tried to get the state legislature to enact restrictions on the press because he didn't like how he was being covered here we are 110 years later and sounds like some of what's going on now the middle article is talking about uniform adoption of uniform textbooks in Florida and some of the issues with that what I actually want to focus on is the last one where it's talking about a particular report from the commission to inspect the state and state of silence and it tells me that the report was actually included in the senate journal I'm looking at April 3rd as a date and I go to the Florida Senate website their archive site and pull up at the April 3rd journal of the Senate and I find here's the beginning of that eight page report the entire text of that report is actually included in the journal of Senate but I would never know to look for that if I hadn't had that article telling me here's where that report exists looking at title the presentation government the sunshine state looking at sunshine laws in terms of open records laws public records open meetings here's some of the resources that I will use quite often the government of the sunshine man manual is actually made available through the attorney general's office and it's jointly produced by the attorney general's office from state of Florida and by the first amendment foundation the office of open government site maintained by the Florida governor has opened and closed over time but it's currently available it does provide some information breakfast center at the university Florida school of journalism has quite a bit of information in terms of looking for open government resources they are the middle of changing to a new website and at the moment the only material that has actually migrated to the new site is the attorney's fees database but I communicate with them last week and they are at the process of migrating these other resources over to the new website first amendment foundation produced this far to public records handbook back in 1999 so it's quite old it is out of print but if you can't get your hands on it it's really really useful for figuring out how to look for specific type of information in Florida the entries on it talk about where to look why it's useful it provides tips and uh tricks in terms of how to look at the information how to locate it it also identifies what key pieces of information that are available in these public records and so you can see in terms of the listings of the different types of reports that are made available that are described here in terms of locating information around the state so this will pull the table of contents here to give you a feel for what might be out there and how to go about looking for it again this is out of print but if you get a hand on a copy it is really useful in terms of government accountability the opaga office out of the state legislature provides some really good reports the auditor general site again provides great resources in terms of finances and performance audits of state agencies and local government agencies and then the transparency Florida site the you can look by agency or by topic if I click on the consumer protection and insurance link here I actually find that there are multiple agencies in the state of Florida that may have specific programs that I might be looking for information detailed information about those programs at the auditor general site I can look by audit types I'm looking for performance audits operational performance audits I can restrict to that I can look by if the audits I can look at just state agencies or look at smaller organizations within the state the transparency Florida site gives you a lot of different types of resources in terms of includes for example the salaries of state employees including state universities all public record in terms of statistical sources I will often use Bieber the Bureau of Economic and Business Research of the state of Florida I'm sorry University of Florida the farthest district abstract that they produce is really useful similar to how you might use the statistical abstract of the U.S. in terms of fighting a table there and they're looking at the footnotes to see which agency which publication provides more information unfortunately I just saw recently that the their website as of the middle of December they are not getting the funding to continue to provide some of the data they've been providing on the website free so there's going to be charges to access their information after middle of December the state legislature maintains the Office of Economic and Demographic Research which has great resources in terms of statistical data also the Florida charts from the Florida Department of Health so here's just a quick page from the farthest statistical abstract you can see very similar to the statistical abstract with the U.S. the Economic and Demographic Research Office of State Legislature has a lot of really specific statistical data sources for you very current here's one of those the local government financial information handbook which actually will give you county by county tax distributions for all the special taxes that are in fact around the state mobile home licensed tax tells how much each county gets for their share of that revenue the Florida health charts site I'm looking at the behavioral risk factor data and you can actually select specific categories of health data and then get county by county listings and some nice graphs from that if I look at statutes getting back to our dates rush through these last ones 1927 is generally the compilational laws that I would go to most but there are digital copies of some of those earlier versions 1941 is when you actually start seeing Florida statutes continuously produced and you'll see them at the odd-debrate years up through 1969 because the state legislature did not meet they only met the odd-debrate years so you only got new statutes every odd year we had new state constitution 1968 that reconfigured a lot of things with the state so major watershed point in the state of Florida and the state statutes started to be reducing every year but until 1998 you had an odd-debrate full statutes multi-volume and a single-volume supplement for just the changes of the even-debrate years point out something in the foreign statutes index looking alphabetically after sheriff and shopping carts there's an entry for short titles has over 700 entries if you're looking for something like Baker act or the state living law which is actually the motor vehicle warranty enforcement act I would probably look online but this will give you those other entries the index to special local laws actually gives you those details of the laws that established specific cities I think know the reedy creek improvement district law which was established in 1967 it's actually the 1960th law that was passed that year and it established Walt Disney world but you have to know that it's reedy creek improvement district actually located there state legislature meets essentially in the spring it used to be every other year now it meets for a 60-day session starting in March it meets on the first Tuesday after the first Monday because it used to be in April and they didn't want to start the legislative session or April Fool's Day online sunshine is a great website for the state of Florida in terms of location information one of the notes in terms of looking for bills as of 1990 even number bills are Senate bills odd number bills are house bills so for example if you look in 2017 you will find that the bills only go up even number through 1026 so there is no even number bill 3692 because odd number bills are house bills and there's a lot more house bills introduced here's that online sunshine site state of Florida restructured completely so the statutes in the state of Florida changed from chapter 200 to chapter 1000 and there was no tracking back to those also the state organization of higher education governing they did away with it in 2001 and got reestablished through a political initiative by senator Graham to reestablish the board of governors which will have a gap there and so there will be here's looking at the 2016 foreign statutes for school districts and it looks like there's only goes back to 2002 you actually have to look at the 2001 foreign statute to see the earlier history of that same language interesting thing of the state of Florida we're just getting interesting things really quickly here the state secretary of state reports include things like the automobiles that were registered to the state here's rewards that were offered in the state lots of interesting things with these old volumes the Florida library collection actually has those auto registrations digitized in it special tax districts make up a huge part of the state you can actually look at all of these and find listings for them on the the special districts list site department agriculture maintains the charity list and you can actually find the 990 forms available for specific charities but you have to sort of know which one you're looking for state transportation does a interesting you can actually see the the traffic cameras across the highway see what accidents are construction projects that sort of thing writing up I would go to the ask a librarian service for the state of Florida which is the state library actually maintains a lot of the responding response to that but there are a lot of other libraries participating responding if you're a librarian in the state of Florida you can contact other depository librarians for help there's two lists that are maintained down the state library and at the University of Florida need to contact them about how do I get on that distribution state library has done some webinars for state agencies but I've got links here for some of those that give you some links and here is the follow-up information for contacting me and for a link to that research guide where I will be putting all of the listings for links to all the resources on there and that concludes the webinar back to you Ed. Thank you very much.