 We are very excited to have you here today. So today's webinar we have with us Naomi Letter, or the title of the webinar is Food, Energy, Water, Health, and Informacion on Español, Webguides Featuring US Government Websites. Naomi is Professor Emerita at Colorado State University Libraries and was the Government Information Librarian at CSUL, which is a selective depository in the years before she retired. She completed the FDLP Coordinator Certificate Program as part of the 2018 cohort and used government documents throughout her entire career. So we're gonna hand over to Naomi and get started. So a little bit about me. I'm also part of the accidental librarian, even though I've used them my whole career because it was added to my other responsibilities. I've been a generalist and then mostly a humanities subject specialist in my career. And then I did take government documents at library schools, so I've been into them. I'm gonna, this is a rough outline of what I'm gonna be talking about. I'm gonna be talking about recommendations for building guides. And there's gonna be repetition because I know that with webinars, sometimes children, cats, dogs, and other assorted animate objects can interrupt. So I wanted to make sure that the key important points get repeated often enough. And then I just wanna encourage you, just like Linda has to type any questions or comments in the chat. And I'm happy to talk with you after the session as well. I've not put my email on here because this is gonna go on YouTube, but you're librarians and I did chat yesterday and I'm still in the directory so you can find me. And the first thing about building guides that I think is important is to have an introduction. What is the purpose of the guide? And then it is also sometimes helpful to mention the audience and how you're arranging it and then key access points or in other words, a rough table of contents depending on what you're doing. And so for example, in the government information introduction, the way the live guides are set up, there's a line up there and ditto with the history there's a line. And then I have an additional introduction underneath and in the government documents I'm saying, that we're trying to select items that we believe to be helpful to local researchers defined as our affiliates and citizens who live in our congressional district. But I do go on to say, government publications are available to the entire public. And that's something I think it's important to emphasize when you're talking about government documents. And so I have the example that I have from my history one of my subject areas, how I arranged that guide. And then I feel it's so, so, so important to annotate your entries. I can't tell you how often I've gone to web pages and there's no annotation. And so I don't know, do I wanna click on the first one? Do I wanna click on the third one? Is the fifth one interesting? I don't know. So telling a little bit about what's in that link is really helpful. And so the arrow is pointing to, there's over 300 collections divided into these subjects at the Library of Congress. Now, I don't bother to repeat in the annotation that it's a digital collection. But if that isn't obvious from the title of the page, I would have added that in there. And then I think it's also important for databases. And I have an example here for one of my history pages where I'm saying, hey, by the way, this covers the U.S. and Canada and some Latin America. And then these are terms that I recommend to search, subject terms that I identified. And then going on when trying to share these things, you wanna have the shortest, tidiest URL you can get. One of the things I wish was always possible is the URL should fit on a pencil. Now, I know just from my own personal experience that sometimes I can't control what's going on at the beginning of the URL, the minute you have control, make it as brief and as clear as possible. That's gonna be important. If for no other reason, you wanna be able to find your own page quickly later as well, you're teaching a class and you say, oh, I have a page on such and such. And you can just quickly say, oh, well, it's gonna be health or food or something at the end of it. And so now I'm gonna talk about the information on Espanol. And I do wanna thank the two women who translated the pages for me since Spanish is not my second language or my first language. But I had a rationale for creating the page after I became the government information librarian. I'm thinking, hey, wait a minute. In Colorado, we have a lot of Spanish speakers and part of our land grant mission is reaching out to the entire state community. So I think it made perfect sense to create a guide in Spanish showing the government pages that are useful for them. My plan is after I get through my slides to go visit the pages on the web directly. But here's the URL. We have LibGuides now at Colorado State. So I'm stuck with libguides.colostate.edu. But then, okay, GovInfo, keeping that brief and then Espanol without the nice little tilde for the rest of the URL. And then so I talk about the general US Gov site and then I put things alphabetically. I did notice I had a lot on health. So I made that separate. And then since I'm in Colorado, I said, okay, here's the stuff that's available in Spanish here in Colorado. And then I'm still a librarian. I can't help myself. And then stuff in print that is in Spanish. And so these were the categories that I found. And I always think it's important to come up with your categories after you've found your sites because maybe there's nothing on agriculture. So you don't wanna have an agriculture entry there was. And as you can see, I alphabetized them on the, or well, you can't, well, I mean, I have it here, alphabetized in Spanish and on the page itself they're alphabetized in Spanish. But if it was gonna be English, health and housing would of course have different locations. And here's an example of the social security page in Spanish and information about, you know, disability, helping with drug costs, retirement. I love the Spanish word for retirement. I thought that was a wonderful, wonderful word. Jubilación, I can get into that. And, you know, as I said, multiple entries. So I created a separate section, but because of my alphabetical list, I said, okay, go to the next box and had, you know, entries there. I made the annotations in Spanish. What I did is because again, I don't know Spanish really well. I wrote things in English and then gave them to the translator to translate into Spanish because, you know, having the stuff in Spanish, I wanna describe them in Spanish. And since I started this whole conversation talking about the importance of annotations, I wanna make sure that I followed through with them. And then here's the section of Colorado information in Spanish and then some information from the Department of Labor. They have some listings of things in Spanish and then I have these things in English so that if, you know, people ask, okay, Colorado Resource Guide for Families with Children because I wanted to be able to come up with that quickly. And then, you know, for your own purposes, you will wanna customize for your own state, your own community, whatever that happens to be. You'll, are there enough people in your area that justify another language? And then if you don't know the language yourself, find a translator and, you know, someone who's familiar enough to help you out. I was lucky enough that my translators included another librarian. So I knew that things were gonna be on point for me. Another thing is if you can find someone else's page, you're welcome to, you know, I mean, that's the whole point of the way I'm pointing to other people's stuff. But I would recommend if you do point to someone else's page. You might emphasize, say, if you were to point to the one at Colorado State University Libraries, emphasis or subject, you know, divided talking about Colorado and then include information about your own state or region on your own page with your own annotations. And so the Topical Government Information Guides, they were designed for the first year of composition students. I was so excited when there finally was a topic that lent itself to government information and it was food, the first one. And they're listed on the Government Information Guide. On the left-hand side, you can see there's the homepage and then I have arrows pointing the food, water, energy and health guides. And under them, by the way, is the information on Espanol. And then on the right-hand side, I have a screen snap shot of the page from the Librarian's Guide for CO 150 and, you know, she's nicely pointing to the guides as well. So one of the things about government information I felt is a lot of people don't seek it out because they don't really know they exist. And so what I'm trying to do is get them outside of their own little pigeonhole and say, oh, you know, I'm doing composition and oh, there's government information. That's really neat. And my hope is that the students will get excited about these sources and they know they exist, you know, they learning they exist. And then also they're useful because when you graduate from university, you don't have access to all those proprietary databases that we pay mucho dollars for. So the government documents will be available. And so, you know, these were the guides. And I was so pleased because when I came up with the idea, I started building the page and I shared it with the students in the spring semester before the food became the theme. And, you know, because, well, I think it's okay, but what do students think? I mean, they're my audience. And so it's very important to show these things to students. And it was so flattering. The students in the class were really excited. Their topic was not food, but they were really taken with the page. And I even got at least one possibly two emails from students in the class afterwards who said, hey, please share that URL with me because I want to look at the thing. So that just really pleased me a lot because, you know, my intended audience of first year composition students liked where I was going with it. And the reason that of course they needed the URLs, I hadn't linked to it yet. I was still working on it. And so there's a table of contents. So that's one of my feelings about building pages, partly because I do tend to be prolific, shall we say. But I also recognize that it's no fun to scroll through a lot of stuff. I just want to jump to the thing I'm interested in. I don't want to be scrolling. I don't know if food allergies is going to take up, you know, three clicks of the mouse or whatever, but I can just click on it and get to where it is. So unless your page is really brief, I think a table of contents is really important. And so, you know, I talked about how food impacts life and because I'm at an academic library with access to reference databases online, I did link to some proprietary databases, but I always made it very clear. Hey, by the way, this is for CSU affiliates. You can read more, you know, here, you know, if you're a CSU affiliate, and it's a sort of thing that if, you know, someone from another library were to point to it for, which would be lovely. I don't think anyone has, but you know, should that day come that they would say, hey, by the way, here's a link to our proprietary database that has definitions for these things, just to show that it all fits in nicely. So here are some URLs for things on, you know, eating recommendations, and I really love the MyPlate. We saw those on the Spanish guide, and there are multiple languages. So if you have Arabic speakers in your community, you can have choose MyPlate for them. And one with that. And then, you know, another thing, food safety. So talking about safe temperatures and, you know, the food safety from the view of the Agriculture Department, food safety from the view of the Centers for Disease Control. It's showing, you know, the students, oh, the government documents aren't just one voice coming from one perspective. They have, you know, various goals, purposes, and as a researcher, you're gonna have your own focus. And then I really love that trash can with the artistically draping banana, but, you know, food waste is a big topic. And then, you know, I feel like, you know, as a librarian, I'm trying to help my students. And so while food insecurity is a topic, I'm also thinking to myself, I could have part of my audience who is food insecure themselves. So I'm like, okay, here, by the way, here are the programs that are available. So if you wanna look at it from an academic point of view, be my guest. But then I'm also saying, okay, here are our local courses. So if you need some assistance, you might be embarrassed to ask, but I've put it on this guide. I'm trying to be helpful. I'm not being judgmental. I'm like, hey, if you need some food, get some food. And hopefully there will be enough for you. So, you know, particularly during these times of the pandemic that's been a real worry, I understand, and some of the case of 12, but that's not what I'm covering now, but at any rate, so there are opportunities when you're pulling together these resources to point out things that can be useful to your particular audience. And so food, you gotta grow it and harvest it. And so, you know, the department of labor is going to be involved when you're talking about who's planting it and harvesting it. And then, you know, the government accountability office is gonna be talking about, okay, how do these programs work? You know, there's a committee. So it's hopefully informing the students about things going on. Food isn't just growing it and eating it. It's importing and exporting it. So hopefully the business students are seeing some things and saying, oh, oh, okay. That might be interesting for me. That might be interesting for me later. And then I also included on the page some non-governmental sites. And this was because the then person working with the first year composition program asked me to do it. And I'm like, hey, you know, you're the person who's promoting it for me. So I want you to be very, very happy. I mean, I didn't say that to him, but you know, I'm thinking that. And so if he wants international organizations, who, you're getting some international organizations. And it was legit, I think, because it's something that does come up as far as that's concerned. And then I did have a couple of things in print. And then I'm a big fan of subject headings. So I included subject headings, the things that people could look in the library catalog and find not only print, but additional electronic resources, individual hearings, for instance, we have those cataloged in our collection. And then so then the next year or two, year or two passed and the first year composition said, hey, we're not gonna do energy and water. I went, okay. And I really, really liked the food. I said, please, please, please. So I'm like, that made me happy. It's, you know, again, my audience is not me. I like to think I like them, but I'm not the one using them. So if the head of the composition program likes them, that makes me pleased because that's a key audience for me. And so, you know, and then I'm also having a conversation with the researchers, students, whomever. And so I'm giving advice there. I'm saying, hey, you know, you see something on a website and you think you might use it, print it out, save it, keep it somehow because the pages can change and do. I give this advice also when people are using newspaper websites because those can change, you know, you clicked on it at 10 o'clock and it's different at noon. So you wanna have documentation that you can show. Yes, this is what it said at 10 o'clock on Tuesday. And so here are some examples, solar energy. So that's one kind of energy that was out there. And then I'm thinking, oh, hey, there's green jobs. So careers, that's another aspect you can use. And how about jobs in the future? Are there gonna be jobs? And then, you know, energy.gov. And so maybe people will start thinking, oh, that might be a useful place for me to look for things on another occasion. And then, you know, there's different kinds of energy. So radiant electromagnetic energy. And I found this rather fun video that explained things in a charming way. So, hey, it works for me. I'm an expert in this area. And then, you know, a nice picture of the spectrum. And then electrical energy. And then this is an example of one where I'm saying, okay, look up electricity in one of our databases. And I like the little dam with its arrows showing me where things are going. And then, you know, you can test your IQ about things. So hopefully, you know, a fun way to engage the students and me. I have to admit, I took some of the tests myself to see how I was doing. And then, you know, wind energy showing, you know, there isn't just one kind of energy and being creative with it. And, you know, how do they work? The wind turbines. And then nuclear energy is another form of energy. By the way, these are selective. I'm not showing you examples of all the ones on the webpage. And, you know, and so global climate change, nuclear energy is one of the guides. This is a student's guide. So chances are pretty good that I mentioned, you know, the audience's students and whatever. I did these a couple of years ago. So I don't remember exactly what I said on all of them. But there was something. And then, you know, energy consumption. You might not be interested in the creation of it or how it's developed, but how do people use it? And so, you know, energy prices is another thing that can impact people and, you know, things like that. And then one of the things about the live guides, if you're familiar with them, is you can repurpose boxes from other pages. And I had already inherited, as it turns out, some agency websites for energy and statistical resources. And so I just put the boxes on my page. And then as I say on the screen there, I realized there weren't pictures there. And that was one thing I thought was important for the first year composition guide. And I'll be talking about this more later, that I thought at least on my computer screen that there would be pictures on every screen. The things I imported from elsewhere might not have happened so much, but I did add cute little pictures for these two energy sources. And then, of course, I created the water one. And water, you know, I have a template for these guides. I sort of have a direction I'm kind of going, but you need to give yourself some flexibility. So the water actually had two kinds of introductions. I started with talking about how much water it takes to make a t-shirt because, you know, a lot of my audience, college students, you know, you pick up a t-shirt for signing up for something, or you do a marathon or, you know, I just am trying to raise awareness of this. And then I included some scholarly articles, you know, so that, you know, it's not just your librarian saying this, I have some scholars who have done lots of research on this. And so thus, you know, the asterisks and the daggers, you know, the sources from my information, I think it's important, you know, to cite my sources, trying to set a good example for the students. And then I, you know, have an introduction. And then, you know, I go on to say, hey, you know, government documents are great for this. So, you know, we need water to grow food. And, you know, I'm trying not to be controversial here at all. I'm just trying to say, hey, by the way, here's some information to get you started thinking. And I have to admit, and I've mentioned this a couple of times to people, the water was the most depressing one I built because there's so much about unsafe water that, you know, you can drown in it. I learned about radioactive material. You cannot get it out of water. So I'm like, oh, okay. So, but, you know, drinking water safety, we need that. And I remember when we put up a display, I included the US hearing from Flint, Michigan. So it's certainly not an abstract topic about having safe drinking water. And, you know, it's a genuine need, concern. And, you know, I would say human right, but, you know, we'll try to avoid that kind of thing. And then we have water conservation. So that's another area that has, you know, things to talk about. And then water use, how do we use it? And so the students could write about, oh, using water. And then hopefully they're getting some good terms so that when they're going and searching for non-governmental sources, they, you know, have places to start. And then, of course, water and agriculture. One of the things I learned is that, although it didn't surprise me, is that most of the water used in this country is for agriculture. And then, you know, we can get power from water. This was the guide that we saw for the nuclear and there's one for water. And there are these rather large documents that are available as PDF online. So I think, you know, particularly during this pandemic, it's nice to know that it's more than just some of the general generic things that are online, but some of the documents that were traditionally in print are now in PDF. So students can still access them. And here's an example of, okay, I'm in Colorado. So I'm gonna talk about Colorado topics. And, you know, if you're in another state, you talk about your stage topics. So, you know, Colorado, Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins, different concerns. And again, you would customize for your own place. And the USGS has some wonderful information and so you can change your water resource to whatever geographic area you might be in yourself. And we have a wonderful Colorado State Publications Library. She sends things out. They're quite interesting. And I said, hey, can I just put your blog entry on my guide? And she said, sure. So, you know, so I did get permission for just copying and pasting her list. And I just set it off with an introduction. If you have a list of titles isn't necessary to annotate every single last one of them, but you do wanna set them up. So, you know, and I do warn people that that water plan is almost 600 pages. So, you know, entry warning. And then the water also had some maxed, I'm sorry, mapped box entries. And I don't think I actually put pictures on these yet, but just to round off what that was doing. At any rate, the guides happily, I'm so pleased because I spent a lot of time on them, proved popular among the composition people. So when health came around, the first year comp person said, hey, can you do this? And I said, by when? And she said, before summer semester. And I want you know, I beat it. They had it done the Friday before the Monday classes. So, on this one, again, I'm gonna have my introduction and some links to affiliate sources. I have some quotes about health and the table of contents for health ended up being so long I put pictures even on the table of contents because it was like, oh my gosh, I am trying to have my policy of images on every screen, well, every one of my screens and the table cons got really long and it has all these subdivisions. And then my suggestion about table of contents is to finish the page first and then put the table of contents together because you wanna have a sequence that makes sense. And in fact, I changed the sequence at the request of the current C-150 librarian. Again, I need that person to be happy, happy to make that person happy. That's, and she said, okay, if you could shift things this way, I said, sure, happy to do that. So the sections have their own little introduction and a little information about what's going to be in that area. And then these were the other subsections from that table of contents. So I'm repeating the stuff at the top and then I'm including it in the middle and lower parts of the document because again, it is lengthy and I'm trying to be user-friendly so someone can just jump and click on the individual thing they want without having to scroll endlessly. And so in addition to the annotations that I feel so strongly about is, get some research tips. Hey, by the way, it's on the web, anyone's gonna get to this. So I can say, oh, search your browser for this and this is my recommendation for coming up with health sites for other states and locations. And so, you know, not all my audience is local. I mean, we have students from out of state and whatnot. So, hey, I wanna be helpful to them. And then, you know, given these trying times and actually it was kind of interesting working on this health guide during the beginning of the pandemic because nearly every single government information page had all this information about COVID and so I was trying to filter through, say, okay, yeah, is this gonna be useful after the crisis because, you know, things are gonna move on, I hope eventually sooner rather than later but, you know, we need to be ready for them. At any rate, you know, Colorado has a crisis service. So my students might be in crisis. Hey, there's a service you can use. And then, you know, health is beyond physical and mental. There's also, you know, financial health and I'm a big Money Smart Week fan. I was quite crushed, but I certainly did not object but, you know, we canceled Money Smart Week this year. And, you know, I lined up all my speakers. I'd raised money and done all this stuff. But anyway, the new government information librarian has my Money Smart Week information. So hopefully when things clear up there'll be another Money Smart Week at CSU Libraries. So other things to note in an annotation is, you know, I'm doing my health guide in English, but hey, this information's also in Spanish. So I'm like, okay, here. And I put the term in Spanish and this is quite purposefully because that way if someone's just searching the web, they're searching it in Spanish, probably if they're looking for information in Spanish. And so this'll come up and hopefully they know about Find on a page. But at any rate, you know, I'm saying, hey, also in Spanish, that's available to you. Another thing that I think is super important when creating your guides is putting the home organization. So, you know, Medline, CDC. I got this from the Department of Labor. I got this from Energy. I got this from Help in Human Services. Wherever you get it from, I think it's important to put it there. It helps your students with their citations, but I've also found it extremely useful when pages have disappeared from time to time. I know I have a starting point. And just informationally, a lot of the stuff on the EPA is under archives, just so you know. You may have already noticed it yourself. At any rate, so those are things I've done, but then things you can do in addition to the things I've already been discussing is, you know, create your own guide. You know, introduce the topic, link to the sites and pages. You know, please annotate them, describe what's there. You know, is it photographs, manuscripts? What kind of years are covered? You know, do you need some special software to use it? There's all sorts of considerations that you want to make sure you don't neglect. And then, you know, here are my examples where I'm introducing the topic. You know, I'm talking about food, we need it for life. And, you know, I talk about how dietary needs can vary even from person to person. You know, food exists in legend and myth. You know, and how water on earth, you know, does impact the kind of life we have and then the kind of energy. Just saying, hey, there's more than just energy is a generic term. And then talking about health. So I'm going to hammer it in again. You got to have annotations. Or, you know, why would I click on this one instead of that one? So give people a clue. I think that's so important. Now, sometimes it's hard to come up with your own text. I mean, you're putting together a large document, you're rushed for time, I get it. Well, this is where you can take your quotes from the site. I have found that the about sections, about us, you know, our mission, that kind of location on a site can be a useful place to find material. Sometimes you can just see it on the homepage. But, and I always put quotation marks around things. And, you know, okay, I got this from the solar energy technology office. That's where I got it from. And then that doesn't mean you have to stop there. I have three examples here where I go on to discuss other things. You know, that, you know, the science school, I quote them and then I'm saying, okay, I'm going to write them down. And by the way, they have some stuff in Spanish and Chinese. So that's not necessarily going to be in the, you know, in their introductory texts, but I saw that. And so I'm informing my users that this is there. And then, you know, because government information is so lovely, you want to get it into as many guides as possible. I was a history librarian and I used government resources a lot. I knew about them. And so when I'm doing, I remember being surprised, but hey, I'm going to point it out that there were, there was information on European labor statistics in the serial set. Okay. I wasn't expecting to see that there, but you know, I'm going to tell my users it's there. For some specific years in the 1800s. Okay. So I like to think that we just mean normalizing them or not just saying, Oh, by the way, these are the government documents. I don't do that on my history or other, you know, on my history guides. I'm like, okay, here's some resources. Some of them are on the free web. Some of them are proprietary databases. Some of them are proprietary databases that are government documents as well. But, you know, this is your topic. I'm just, this is another resource. I think, I think we want to keep government information sources from being the other or different or scary. I think it's just, no, they're just another resource. They do have their own little quirks, but so does everything else. So just slide them in. And, and then that final comment is super important. His new stuff shows up all the time. So you never really finish a guide or a webpage. You, but you know, you can have some closure and say, okay, I'm done for now. I can teach my class. I'm good for summer semester. Hopefully fall semester. But, you know, if a student or a faculty member says, Hey, I found this really cool source. Happy to add it. No problem. That that is doable. And then, you know, I fall under the get long winded. So that's why I have table of contents. So there's the ones for energy and water. And for water, I even have water identifying books. And that's probably got some nice subject headings for searching the library catalog. And then I've talked about, I've made a point of putting pictures on the first year comp, you know, the first year student guides. And so, you know, putting pictures. Don't put this many, that would be a mistake. If you do that, no one's going to be able to pay attention because they're going to be frantically looking around at goodness knows what, but so I did this as a deliberate don't do this. But it's nice to have some pictures. You know, I love this water cycle so that can help explain how water works. I have a snapshot of a particular publication that's in Spanish. You know, I've got some nice wind turbine, the nice apple helping for eating. I also not going to remove the chocolate when I was doing this, you know, and then health. I'm implying here exercise. So, and I would say over the years, I've only once had someone say, hey, that's a copyrighted image. And I took it off. The person was willing for me to leave it up if I linked to the site, but I went and I looked and I'm like, oh, it doesn't quite fit in with what I'm doing. So I just removed the image and I emailed the person and said, I just took it off and it's fine. So I think a sample size of one image out of the thousands I've probably put up, it's not bad. And then, you know, of course, you want to have the images be relevant. So when I'm talking about drinking water safety, you know, glass of water, we're pouring water, we're having a nice child admire water, you know, water use, washing your hands, waters used in swimming pools, you know, and showers. And then the radiant electromagnetic energy, you know, I have things that show waves, you know, radio, microwave, infrared, visible ultraviolet X-ray and gamma rays. So nice visual representations that fit in with what I'm talking about in that location. I really think it's important to have images that connect to what you're talking about at that moment. Now this does mean it can take a little longer to find the images because you can't just go to your search and find something random. You do need to put some thought into it. But I personally think it's well worth the effort. Other things you can add in your annotations are search tips. Now, search or browse for recipes. You can put in ingredients. Oh, that's useful to know. You know, rather than entrees and appetizers, the dessert. Oh, by the way, these have nutrition facts. So that way the person knows if they're going to click on this, what to expect. This, of course, only works as long as they don't change the stuff behind it. One of the things I had occasionally done over the years is we don't have students anymore. But occasionally I can get a student in the admin office or the help desk and say, hey, could you just go who clicked through everything on my sites? Because while I do look at the link bots, they don't kick back unless it doesn't, nothing comes up or something. And so does the page actually still have what I say it has? And they can send me a list and then I can either find where it's located now or say, OK, it's gone and remove it. Other things that are important. I do try to avoid linking to bad pages. But sometimes it's like, wow, the information is so good. I'm going to link to it anyway. But I do want to warn my users. Hey, by the way, the font size is weird. There were some pages that I had. Forget what subject area there were about. But I would give people advice on how to change their browser to default to white backgrounds and black text because you just couldn't read the color contrast. But the content was so good. I just thought I have to point to this. So someone can read that bad contrast. That's fine. They're free to do it. But they're like me and can't read it. So here's some advice for how you can adjust it so you can access that material. And then of course now with every not everyone but a whole lot of us working remotely, students working remotely, whether they're undergraduates or graduates or K through 12, people doing research, they're writing books, they're working on dissertations or whatever. They're just interested. You know, there's some wonderful government resource stuff that's available remotely. And when I inherited the government pages, they were so science-y, science, science, science, science, engineering, engineering. It was all that kind of thing. And I'm like, wait a minute, there's some good humanities stuff in there and I don't want to neglect it. So I added history and history and art because I don't want to neglect those wonderful resources. The Smithsonian Institution has some excellent material. And I wanted to emphasize as well, you know, it's not just our government that has stuff. You can go to the United Kingdom. The British Library has an incredible amount of wonderful material. And I need to share that with my researchers. And you're trying to find information about things. National libraries are a place to go. National libraries are in their, you know, probably by their own, sort of by definition a government document or government resource. So, you know, it probably actual mileage varies. But you know, this is how the nation is presenting itself to the world. And I know I found it quite interesting when I was doing my World War II web page that I found the articles of them signing the end of World War II in Japanese online. And you could scroll through the book. And because of course it was in Japanese, you scroll from what we would consider the back of the book to the front of the book. So from right to left. So that was kind of interesting. And so it's also showing students, oh, there's cultural differences. The books are put together differently. Other ways to, you know, get involved with getting the government documents on resources is, you know, hey, talk with your colleagues. I mean, I'll pop up in meetings or I popped up. I should use past tense, I guess. But, you know, pop up, hey, now there's a government resource for that. You know, we should share that. You know, if I run into a colleague, I've looked at their web page and they've got a government document. I'm like, hey, that's great, you know, good for you. And that, you know, I'm happy to help. If someone have questions that lend themselves, government resources. And it did work. It really did work. I started getting more questions and I can't tell you how thrilled I was. I was starting to get emails from faculty members and graduate students from around campus that, you know, the word had gotten out. There was a government information library and happy to help. As I'm sure my the incumbent is as well, happy to help. There are academic opportunities. And this is where I grabbed on to the first year composition, where I said, oh, government information fits in. I actually was at a welcome party for the new president of the university. And I talked with the faculty member and boom, I was teaching a class on government information resources and was, of course, delighted when afterwards he said, wow, I learned about stuff I didn't know existed. So that was exciting. So that's part of it. And then, you know, you're promoting the government information to other places. When you have a service desk, I haven't been on a service desk for years, which mean what the questions are. But if you can get an ear out, I mean, are there lots of questions about such and such and say, oh, they're a government document for that or a set of government documents, see that if you can put something together that the people who actually interact with the public can find and find useful. And then within your community, there's opportunities to I haven't done this myself, but create a guide that's aimed at the younger set. So Ben's guide is going to be your friend. If you can promote your guide to the local public libraries, I tried to do that myself. I said, could you point to the government information guide? I mean, you're, you know, our city, county people have access to them. I mean, they're free government resources, but I heard back that they won't link to non-library things, grumble, grumble, grumble. But I think at least having asked the question, they know it exists. So that's another way to say, hey, you know, this is still useful for the public. And then you could adapt to what the public's interested in. Other ways to see that the stuff gets done is say, hey, I'll create the guide myself. You know, you don't have to tell the subject specialist, well, you have to do it. Just do it, you know what I mean, talk with them. Don't just go off and spend a lot of time and say, hey, would you mind if I put together a guide and with the food one, they're like, hey, sounds great. And then the other ones were by request, please do this. We really like them. So, you know, and do it and actually do it and then send it to the person you've created it for and take their feedback incredibly seriously. They are your audience that's promoting it. And as I mentioned earlier, I rearranged the health sequence. You know, I had in the sequence that made sense to me. And the CO150 person said, you know, I think it worked great, fine, changed it. And then after all that, then I created the table of contents. So, you know, you really, you know, yeah, it's my guide, but I'm not the primary person promoting it and using it. So I want to make sure that the people who are doing that are happy with what I've done. And then, you know, other ways and maybe not creating an entire guide. But you can say, hey, I'll create this section of a guide. I'll identify the sources, I'll annotate them. And all you have to do is slide them in. And when I say slide them in, I'm like, hey, do the coding. However, whatever format you're using, just make it easy just so they can just grab it, put it in. Don't have to do any effort at all. And then that's a way, you know, I think for getting the government information out there without forcing your colleagues to, you know, have to spend time on it. It's like, okay, here, I can help. And let me do what I can. And then, yeah, questions, comments. Now I do plan to show the pages themselves. Oh, we're running out of time. But and then I am interested in any success stories you might have. And if you do create your own wonderful guides, which I'm sure they all will be, I hope you'll send me the URLs because I'm interested in seeing what other librarians might do that is of interest to their own local population. Because, you know, I'm obviously, I might be retired, but I'm still wildly passionate about this. I'm still very interested in, you know, people succeeding with their government resources. So I had put together, I don't know, I guess I can look in the chat and see if there's something or... And if people want to add their guide, you know, show off your guides too, you can feel free to put links in the chat to their guides that you want to share with anybody. But if you wanted to show your guides, you'll have to share your screen again. OK, OK, yeah, let me let me let me close that. OK, yeah, I've got to find the thing. OK, share the screen. OK. And there's a question about usage. If you look at the usage statistics and if there are things that are more popular, things that actually get clicked on and things like that. Oh, yes, yes, yes. I after the first year of food, I looked at the stats and the food with my number one used guide on the government documents. And I do for any of my pages, yes, it's excellent. Look at the stats, you know, something's not being used. Well, then it, you know, obviously isn't serving a purpose. But I do know within sub pages if I I'm like, oh, this one, I wasn't expecting that to be I call them best sellers. But if it's a best seller, then I'm really actively in a more active way, making sure that I'm putting new and current information on it. So, yeah, I have looked at the stats and they've been good. Are there other questions? I think if you have questions, no other questions at this point. But I was wondering how much and you may have mentioned it. And I didn't catch it. But is there a specific amount of time that you spend on these or had you dedicate time? Because it is a lot of information. It was a lot of work. I, you know, I didn't add up the time, but I started the most recent one that I did. So I have a clear memory of that. I think I was sent an email in late March, mid March, said, OK, the new thing is going to be health. And I started working on it in April. I think I started working on it when I was working at home. And I would say it dominated my life pretty heavily for weeks. The other ones I was able to do spread out more. I mean, I did the food one over a period of four or five months. But I sort of had this, the first year comp wasn't being very communicative, you know, every now and then I'd swing by my colleague and say, so do they have a theme yet? You know, and she'd say, not yet. And she would send them a reminder every now and then. So that one was crushed together. But I'd say, you know, it was probably, it'll wild guess 80 to 120 hours. I was doing other work projects. That wasn't the only thing I did for that time period. But yeah, it was. But I think some of them you can pull together very quickly. It's just that health was particularly complex and it was particularly challenging trying to read through the web pages when almost, as I said, almost everyone had a header about COVID-19. Right. Like, OK, this is a big issue. And in fact, I do have on the health page, I do have government information related to the coronavirus. That is, you know, the very first section. And this is something that I actually have on the home page as a government information guide. And so I update, this is the one I'm pointing to. So I had, you know, here's the home page of the government information. Oh, I have it here. This is what the guide looks like. That's the incumbent now. But, you know, I said, OK, here's the government information guide. And, you know, we all have different styles for things. But at any rate, yeah, so I talked about that. But yeah, it was like, OK, is there other stuff beyond COVID-19 on this page? And, you know, there frequently was. But I had to go look. But, you know, this is where it's so neat if someone else has it. But, you know, here's the, and I know we're almost out of time. So hopefully the URLs are findable. But, you know, here's information in Espanol. And then again, I had pictures. And then, you know, the food, lots of lovely pictures. I bumped up the size of my screen so it'll be clearer. So that's why there's not all these pictures on a page. And then, you know, the water, you know, there's actually a section, you know, on hearing specifically about food, energy, and water. And I'm like, cool, OK, we'll just point to that. The Water Resource Archive, it's something we have at CSU. So I talked about that on the web page. So I don't know how much they're going to be getting remotely, but, you know, when we're in person, people can go to the archive in person. And then, you know, there's a recreational water. And, you know, let's travel. And then with energy. My energy one, you know, I talk about there's a template, but then you do different things. Energy was very complex in its own, you know, in its own way. And so I'm like, OK, here's some reference books where you can find information about energy. And here they are CSU affiliates only, of course, for these. But, you know, sometimes I had an annotation and I said, hey, you know, check our catalog for the call number or whatever and whether we own it. So energy about sites. And then this is the example of the history US in government resources. So primary sources. But anyway, round of times, so sorry. And just to answer Tara, we will have the recording up. Could you share your slideshow with us? Would that be OK? Yeah, I'm planning on putting it on my own guide, too. OK, awesome. Yeah. And just share that with us so I can link to it. So in the YouTube video, we'll link to the resources. OK, OK, great. Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you so much. This is very fascinating. It's a lot of work and really amazing work that you've done there. So great job. Anything to get those government information stings up there? Yeah, definitely. And a lot of information that people can link to our draw funds, so thank you so much for that. Yeah, so if you have questions for Naomi, feel free to get her guide. Just find her guides in the email. I'm sure she has ideas. I don't make guides anymore, really, in my job. But I definitely sometimes would run into a kind of mind blankness about what I should do on certain things. So this is a lot of work. Yeah, well, my email's probably better. I don't know how much longer my name's going to be on these, because we're going to be over. But you can go to the directory and find my. I mean, it's my name. CSU, you know, in the whole state. Awesome, right. Yeah, no, it's interesting. I very purposefully, one of the things I didn't talk about in this webinar is, you know, I don't like the upper things being crowded. Yeah, sometimes it's CSU. Yeah, not much you can do. There's no sequence. And I think sequence is very, very important, because I am trying to do a research strategy here. Yeah, that makes sense. You know, some of these sort of abstract topics, it's not going to be as big a thing. But, you know, I'm saying, hey, start here. If I'm doing a history guide or an English guide or whatever, I'm like, hey, start here. This is where you want to start. Yeah, no, definitely. You're going to, you know, and so sometimes I'm like, hey, go out on the web. Other times I'm like, hey, look in some reference books. Other times I'm saying, hey, here's some books. Other times it's like, hey, you need journal articles. So you really need to say, I'm trying to do it as a research strategy. These guides aren't really research strategy-y, as it were. But in general, you do want to have a research strategy. So, that'd be right. Awesome. And there's a, if you are interested in this topic or learning more about it, Naomi has a, you have an article, right? That was in DTTP. Yes, yes, it was in the summer DTTP. Okay, and we will link to that as well on the YouTube. Yeah. Yeah, well, thank you very much, everybody. Sorry, we went a little bit over, but that's okay. If you have any questions again, feel free to get in touch with Naomi. And if you have any ideas for webinars, let us know. Let me know. I would love to entertain ideas from the audience. Thank you very much and have a great day, everybody.