 My name is Linda Kellum. I'm the government resources section of the North Carolina Library Association. And thanks for coming today. We have a great webinar planned for you. I've been putting links into the North Carolina Library Association's government resources sections website as well as our YouTube channel. So if you're interested in more of our offering, then feel free to go to those and find more information there. Today's webinar is entitled North Carolina Government Document's Historic Current and Available Online. Denise Jones is our presenter. She has been the state publication's clearinghouse liaison at the state library's government and heritage library since 2012. As liaison, she stays in contact with North Carolina state agencies to collect and make available the myriad of state government publications, both print and digital. She also collaborates with libraries and state agencies to have significant older print publications digitized and made available through the government and heritage collection, heritage's online collections. So today I've got a few things I want to cover. First, since Linda said I am with the state library of North Carolina, I want to talk a little bit about that just to explain it. Then to talk about our state government digital publications collection. And for many of those items, it's a hybrid collection. Then we'll talk about our state agencies, our catalog, and then talk to you about how you can request online versions of state publications. Well, the state library of North Carolina was established in 1812, and it is the principal library of state government. The current state library is made up of three parts. First is the library for the blind and physically handicapped, and they just celebrated their 60th anniversary in September. This library serves blind people and others who can't handle standard print material either because of a visual disability or perhaps a physical disability, such as being paralyzed or even someone that suffers from dyslexia. The second group, part of the state library, is our library development group. And those folks offer programming and training and consulting and managed grants for the public libraries around North Carolina, both big and small. And then the third part of the state library is the government and heritage library, which specializes in print and digital information about North Carolina. And I am part of the government and heritage library. We also refer to it as a GHL. The physical library itself is located in downtown Raleigh, sometimes called the Archives Building, and we're between the Legislative Building and the Governor's Mansion. The mission of the government and heritage library is to preserve and facilitate public access to state government information, to advance the study and understanding and appreciation of North Carolina's cultural heritage, and to provide library resources and services that support the operational needs of state government agencies. In addition, the GHL is by law the official permanent depository for North Carolina government publications, and it also facilitates public access to the government publications. So the point of today's talk is about accessing government information and publications, both historic and current. Well, items in the state documents collection here at the GHL date back to the 18th century. For many years, state documents were only issued in print, of course, and the GHL has about 100,000 state documents in its print collection. But over the years as technology advanced and also as state budgets shrank, the agencies have moved more and more to digital publishing and sometimes have dropped print publishing completely. So in 2007, the GHL created a digital repository for those born digital agency publications, a way to collect those. And now for the past few years, the GHL has been digitizing some of the older print publications we have in the collection, so that they too are accessible electronically. Now this is the home page and search page for the digital collection of state publications, and that would be both our born digital and those items that have been digitized. So let's look at what the collection offers. If you look on the far right of that screen, we highlight what we call titles of interest. And these are all significant serial publications from various North Carolina state agencies. So many of these are a hybrid collection. We'll talk about that a little bit more later. But of course it means that some issues are born digital and some have been digitized from print copies. Most of the titles on this titles of interest list are considered core publications for state government. And if you look, notice the time range for many of the serials. We have a couple that go back into the 1700s, several from the 1800s. So there's a depth of time in those items. The last item on that list was North Carolina reports. I want to start by talking about those. These are the opinions of North Carolina Supreme Court and the opinions go back to 1778. That was before the court was even called the Supreme Court. The administrative office of the court publishes these opinions both in print and now electronically. When we first began the project was getting the complete collection of North Carolina reports into a digital collection. I found that AOC had CDs of the individual volumes of North Carolina reports going back to the very first volume. Attorneys and researchers could use these CDs but they had to load each volume or CD separately to search. So they weren't terribly useful for doing research. Well we loaded all the CDs for the issues that we already did not have electronically and we created the collection you see here. And if you notice this collection contains not only North Carolina reports which date back to 1778 but it also contains all the opinions of the North Carolina Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals was created by the General Assembly in 1967 and the first opinions were released in 1968. So these court reports contain both the opinions of those courts. This is, there are currently 368 volumes of North Carolina reports. And this is just a screenshot from the, these are the first two volumes from the what 1778 to 1804 and 1789 to 1778. They sort of overlap but this, and as each new report is issued these are added to the collection. Now this on the left is the title page from the first volume. And notice as I said earlier the North Carolina Supreme Court was then called Superior Court in Court of Conference and that was from 1778 to 1805. So the earliest volumes do not say Supreme Court. Well while we were working on getting the older volumes into the digital collection the librarians at the Supreme Court alerted me that there was much more in the court opinion volumes than just the opinions themselves. Over at the Supreme Court they have a growing collection of portraits of former chief and associate justices that hang on the courtroom walls as well as they line the walls of the justice building. Now these portraits were often donated by families of the justices and at the formal presentation of the portrait to the court colleagues as well as family members generally made remarks on the career and life of the subject of the portrait. These remarks are known as portrait presentations and they offer unique and biographical glimpses and often contain rich genealogical and historical information that perhaps is not contained anywhere else. In addition to the portrait presentations the North Carolina Supreme Court occasionally honors a recently deceased justice with a memoir proceeding. It's a format that resembles a more traditional eulogy although shorter and the memorial proceedings are still rich with biographical information. So the text of both these presentations and proceedings are included in the same volume as whatever time period the Supreme Court report is. But there was no index to the portrait presentations and the proceedings so it was difficult to locate a specific person within the collection of 300 and some volumes of Supreme Court opinions. So what we did was we pulled out those separate presentations from the various volumes and pulled them together into a special collection of their own that you see here. Currently there are 87 biographies in this collection and throughout the years the Supreme Court Library has issued a couple of histories either of the Library of the Supreme Court and those are included in this also. And we will be adding to this collection the last volume of the Supreme Court reports that came out actually contain three portrait presentations. So we added those, of course added the volume to the court reports and then added the presentations to the biographies. Now many of the titles of interest are as I said hybrid digital series. So one example is let's look at the North Carolina Vital Statistics. We have all the reports from the first one which is 1914 through the most recent report. Well after 2007 Vital Statistics reports have only been published online as PDFs and there have not been a print copy. Well the GHL had all the issues back to 1914 in our collection. So the older issues we have were scanned and then added to the born digital issues that we already had in the digital collection. So we have in the digital collection all volumes of the North Carolina Statistics from the beginning. There are other state government serials that we have done the same thing to North Carolina Agricultural Statistics, the North Carolina Manual, the House and Senate journals, session laws and even wildlife in North Carolina. Another title of interest that I want to mention today is the North Carolina Manual. So for many years this was a biannual publication by the Secretary of State's office. The last printed issue was in 2007-2008 issue and for a few years it was published electronically only. Then the publication ceased completely with the 2012 issue. The first state manual was published in 1874 and as we were preparing to digitize the North Carolina manuals there were no issues in our collection between the years 1874 and 1903. So I started calling around other libraries and no one had any issues from those years. The first state manual that we had up in the stacks was published in 1874 and a page just inside the title page of an 1874 manual stated, and that's what it's hard to read but that's the box on the left, stated that on February 10, 1874, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a resolution that and I quote, Secretary of State shall calls to be printed at once and again next winter and biannually thereafter, a manual of North Carolina containing the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution of North Carolina with the names of all governors and other executive offices of the state, judges of the Supreme and Superior Courts, members and offices of the Two Houses of the General Assembly, with such chronological and statistical information as he may deem useful. So on the left is that same page from the 1874, well excuse me, on the left is that page that I just quoted from the 1874 North Carolina manual. And on the right is that resolution I just quoted. So that's coming from the digitized North Carolina Session Laws of 1873 to 1874. So they passed the law in 1874 saying there needed to be a manual every other year. But where were those subsequent issues that were required by law? Why such a huge gap? It was sort of a mystery. Well, I went to another digitized state document which is the legislative documents and this one is for the Session 1874 to 75. And within that volume I found the Secretary of State's report to the governor which was dated November 4, 1874. In it, the Secretary reports that he has accomplished the manual of North Carolina required by the early of February resolution. He then adds that, and I quote, I very respectfully suggest that you recommend the repeal of this resolution as its publication by annually would involve the state in a heavy expense. The law was repealed in December of 1874. There were no other manuals until 1903. The 1903 manual was much smaller than the 1874 manual and it was actually called members, committees, rules, etc. But over time the North Carolina manual grew to be more like the publication envisioned in 1874 in the manual of other years. So on the screen is the legislative document, the title page, and then I printed the page from the report from the Secretary of State. And then another digitized document, this is from the session law from repealing the act. It was repealed, ratified the 18th day of December 1874. If you think about it, this was less than 10 years after the end of the Civil War. So the state was really strapped for money and I believe they got the printing bill and decided it wouldn't be the thing to do. Well, this session is about North Carolina state government publications. So I was going to talk about ways to access those publications. So on the opening page of the digital collection we've already looked at, there's a tab at the top that says state agencies. And it goes to a list of all the North Carolina state government agencies. This is the top of the page. So for each agency, there's a brief description of the agency and its responsibilities. And you can link directly to the agency website. It says visit the department's website. You can hit view all publications and that will pull up all digital publications from that particular agency. And there's a search box that will limit your search just to documents from that particular agency. And for example, this is a listing from the Department of Insurance. So under the agency name's a link and it will take you directly to the Department of Insurance's website. And then below is a search box where you can put in your terms and even limit it by field if you wish. Or you can click on view all publications and see all digital publications from the Department of Insurance. Now let's look at searching the catalog for both print and digital. This is the GHL's catalog page. And at the top left it says that we've got the NC Cardinal logo. And if you're not aware, NC Cardinal is a consortium of North Carolina public libraries that share an online catalog and an ILS. So our search page, though, defaults to searching just the GHL collection, which includes state agency publications and other materials in the GHL collection. Now this is a record where we have both print and digital of a particular state agency publication. Just below the title you'll see a great outbox that says digital content. And that link will take you to the digital publication. And underneath that you'll see the holdings. The GHL has two print copies, a non-circulating copy and a copy for circulation. Well, if you were to click on the digital content link, it takes you to the digital copy. It's a PDF that can be searched, viewed, printed, or downloaded. If you want to limit to just digital state agency publications, you can use the same search page we've seen before. And I can search Access North Carolina, which was a title here, and get these results. So it's two different ways to access the same material. And whatever you type in on that previous page is going to search both the title field, subject field, creator, and publisher field. Now what I want to stress today is that you can have a say into what goes into our digital collection. If there is no URL in the digital content box, it will say request online version. And if you click on request online version, it will pop you over to a form. And this is a form to make a digitization request. So you fill out the form with your email address and information about the publication you would like to have digitized. Now the form unfortunately is not working correctly at the moment. We're trying to troubleshoot it. But I would suggest be sure to put the title in that notes field so we can definitely determine what title you're looking for. And you can, because it's not always picking up the title and author below. After you submit this request, someone will go pull the item from our print collection. And we'll be checking to see if there are any copyright issues that we need to sort out. We'll also be looking to see if the document should be digitized in-house, or if it can be included in a shipment for digitization by a vendor. Generally the smaller or more fragile pieces are done in-house. And also at the GHL, we're always on the lookout for state agency publications to digitize and add to the digital collection. And here's an illustration of a recent one. A new publication this year was the Statistical Report from the Council of Women, the Status of Women in North Carolina Employment and Earnings. So the 2018 came out recently. It's strictly published digitally as was the 2013. So going to our catalog and then to the stacks, we found that there had been similar reports from both 1994 and 1975. So we digitized those. So all four of the Status of Women reports are now in the digital collection. And if you have a number of reports, I will tell you about, I believe it was last year, one of the librarians at UNCW had gone through our catalog and made a selection of a number of publications that she saw, print publications our catalog that she would like digitize. So she made a spreadsheet and sent me the spreadsheet, and we pulled those. And we are presently in the process of completing that project. And I would estimate it's well over 100 publications in our print collection that now will be digitized and available in the digital collection. So we can guess at what we would like digitized, but I would love it to have some suggestions from you as to what you would find useful. And in closing, I wanted to alert you if you're currently using our digital collection, we have had to change the way we handle our serials. At the top, you see a multi-item like a compound object. We call it parent child for the Department of Agricultural, Serial Agricultural Review. Well, this is the way we've always displayed state government serials in the past. We would have one object and then all the issues would be attached to it. But sometime back for the larger serials, we began to encounter problems. It wasn't scaling well. So we've had to change the way we treat serials. The items below are now the most recent subsequent issues of agricultural review. So each of them will appear individually. And eventually, we would like to separate the compound objects, but that's for further down the road. But if you just wanted to alert, you're going to see our serials sort of appearing in two different ways. And that concludes my presentation. I want to encourage you, please, to make suggestions for digitization from items in our state documents collection. But if you've got any other questions about what I covered today, I welcome those. And I'm going to move on. I'll put my contact information up. Thank you very much, Denise. And so while we're, I'm going to wait, give people some time if you have questions. Feel free to type those in. A question I had was in terms of, I tend to be an instruction person. I was just going to see if, are you all creating any kind of instructional materials around the state publications? Or have talked about maybe doing that. We have some limb guides around some of the state publications. And we used to create research guides, and we're slowly moving those to research guides. So I know we have one on the North Carolina court reports. We have a lib guide on that. We have something on transportation, Department of Transportation materials. I think that's still a research guide. But yes, not on everything, but we do have some. And I can send you those. Well, I'll have to go offline to locate them, because I think they're in two different places. But I can send those if you want to distribute those later. Sure. Yeah, that'd be great. I think that's the interesting thing for a lot of people is figuring out how to incorporate them beyond reference questions. Right. Because the status of women, there's some cool stuff in there, too. Yes, there is. Mimi asked me a question. I went to me privately, so I'll ask it out. Do y'all include census materials about North Carolina? Well, not the federal stuff, because this is the state government. But within some of the Department of Commerce and some of the agricultural items, there might be some census materials. But the federal census publications are not going to be in this collection. But with the vital stats, y'all have, like, oh, yes, with the vital stats. And so a number of state agencies, Department of Labor, makes use of a number of federal statistics. And so if they publish it in something that they're publishing, so it's coming out of that state agency, it is certainly included in the digital collection. It's just the straight things coming straight from the federal would not be in them. Thank you very much for doing this. It's very helpful. And I didn't realize some of the things were in there. Definitely. All right, well, there's no more questions. Thank you very much. Join me in thanking Denise for the presentation and for talking about some of those materials.