Gift to the Delta, Past and Present: US Government Documents and Resources at the Delta State University Library

Michael Mounce, Laurie Muffley and Mike Emerson

The historic Mississippi Delta is home of the blues, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Delta State University (DSU). In the tightly knit agricultural town of Cleveland, DSU, whose unofficial mascot is the Fighting Okra, is a public university in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. It is here that DSU’s Roberts-LaForge Library houses a mid-sized collection of US government documents and provides access to online US government resources. The library is a selective depository library that receives about 40 percent of the United States government documents that are issued in tangible formats by the US Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). Also, DSU’s library is the only US government documents depository library in the Delta region of Mississippi.

Founded in 1924, DSU is one of two public universities in the vast Mississippi Delta region. As is often the case in rural areas, this institution of higher learning is, and has been, an integral part of the people’s lives in its home county, Bolivar County, and beyond. Before the Digital Age, DSU’s library was one of the few places where the public, in addition to the students, faculty, and staff of DSU, could exercise their rights to access government documents on diverse topics such as civil rights and voting rights. The library officially became a US government documents depository library in 1975, about a decade after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These historically significant events are reflected in the titles of some of the library’s US government documents, such as “School Desegregation in Greenville, Mississippi: A Staff Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights” (published in 1977).1 Other relevant US government documents in the library include “Twenty Years After Brown: A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights” (published circa 1977), “Consultations on the Affirmative Action Statement of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights” (published in 1981), and the “’Voting Assistance Guide, 90–91.”2

Those titles, which are still part of the government documents collection of the library, demonstrate the efforts put forth by the US Commission on Civil Rights and other federal governmental groups to disseminate vitally important information to American citizens during the Print Age of the late-twentieth centure by way of the US Government Publishing Office’s designated depositories. To that end, the purpose of this paper is to discuss how the Roberts-LaForge Library at DSU became a US government documents depository library and to discuss patron usage of the library’s US government documents and resources.

History

In July 1975, the Director of Library Services at the time, Dr. Rush Miller, sent an official letter to the US Superintendent of Documents Office. In that letter, he requested that the W.B. Roberts Library, as it was then called, become a US government documents depository library. Mr. David Bowen, the US Representative for District 2 in Mississippi at the time, had made Dr. Miller aware of his eligibility to apply for the status of government documents depository for the library.3 When Dr. Miller applied for the depository status, he submitted some statements of justification for the library to become a depository library, such as the “ tremendous expansion in its enrollment and programs during the past few years.”4 In October 1975, the Assistant Public Printer for the Superintendent of Documents C. A. LaBarre mailed a letter to Dr. Miller informing him that the library had qualified as an official depository.5 An acceptance of designation form was enclosed with the letter. After Dr. Miller signed that form and mailed it back to LaBarre, who countersigned the form, the library became a depository for receiving US government documents.6 The news of this significant milestone for the library was noted in the news, including in the Jackson, Mississippi newspaper The Clarion Ledger Jackson Daily News.7 It should also be noted that the milestone for the library happened about one year after another milestone occurred for DSU. In 1974, DSU officially had its name changed from Delta State College to Delta State University. The name change of the DSU Library occurred much later in 2003, when its name changed from W. B. Roberts Library to Roberts-LaForge Library.

At the time that the DSU Library became a US government documents depository library, DSU’s home county, Bolivar County, had a population in which African Americans were a majority. According to the USA Facts website, in 1970 the African American community was at 61.4 percent, the white population was at 38.1 percent and the remaining population under the “other” category was 0.5 percent. By 1980, 62.4 percent of the county’s population was African American, 37.2 percent identified as white, with 0.4 percent of the remaining inhabitants being classified as “other.” The total population of Bolivar County in 1970 was 49,500 versus 45,837 in 1980, reflecting a population decline of 7.4 percent. In 2020, the total population of Bolivar County was 30,849. African Americans have continued to be a majority of Bolivar County’s population. The African American population consisted of 64.4 percent, white residents were 33.6 percent of the population, with the remaining inhabitants in “other” categories.8

Government Documents: Resources and Usage

The tangible US government documents in DSU’s library include over 26,000 government documents in various formats (books, booklets, posters, flyers, and pamphlets). They also include over 1,500 CD-ROMS, over 200 DVDs, and fifty-six rows of microfiche slides in file cabinets. In addition to tangible US government documents, the library also has over 50,000 online US government documents available in full text in the online catalog and access to many US government websites on the library’s Government Documents website. DSU and non-DSU patrons can come into the library and use the US government documents in all formats, and they can receive help from reference librarians in finding and using government documents. Many tangible government documents can be checked out by DSU and non-DSU patrons for seven days. Those that cannot be checked out can be used in the library when it is open. Online government documents and resources can be accessed by all patrons.

Mike Emerson, one of the authors of this paper, provided usage data about the government documents. Usage data includes the total number of times particular government documents were checked out during the time period 2002–2019 and the dates of latest activities of government documents during that time period. This time period was selected because it begins when the library migrated to a new integrated library system (ILS) and ends just before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Records brought over from the older ILS lacked the granularity the authors wished to analyze that necessitated the use of records that were created in 2002 or after. The pandemic caused such chaos with the library’s circulation counts that it was decided to not use records from 2020–2022 to prevent the historical event from skewing results.

The latest activities of those government documents include all types of activities: items being checked out, items being checked back in, a patron being billed for an overdue item, and an item being transferred to another library for an interlibrary loan request. In the time period 2002–2019, 202 of the library’s government documents were checked out by patrons. The authors do not have data for any government documents check outs that occurred after 2019. Table 1 includes the titles of the top ten checked-out US government documents, the numbers of times the documents were checked out between 2002–2019 and the dates of those documents’ latest activities.

There are a substantial number of the library’s government documents that were checked out in the 2002–2019 time period, but do not appear in table 1—each of those government documents were checked out one to four times. Table 2 provides data for these government documents regarding the number of checkouts during the 2002–2019 time period and shows many government documents were checked out one to four times.

Table 3 lists the names of various US government departments and other groups and the numbers of the library’s US government documents from those departments that were checked out 2002–2019.

In addition to usage statistics for the library’s tangible government documents, it is also helpful to explore the usage of the library’s government documents website. Thanks to the Google Analytics program that the DSU Library uses, the authors were able to capture some data regarding recent usage of webpages of the government documents website, such as the number of views. The government documents website includes the home page, federal documents webpages, one state documents webpage, and webpages containing library policies regarding its government documents. Table 4 contains the titles of visited webpages of the library’s government documents website from September 19, 2022–September 19, 2023. The table also provides the following data for each webpage: number of views, number of unique users, views per user, and average engagement time. It should be noted that table 4 excludes the webpage for Mississippi government documents, since the scope of this paper is limited to US government documents.

Conclusion

This paper ends as it started: as a record of the contributions that the selected US government documents collection at the Roberts-LaForge Library has made in print and electronically to both DSU and the larger community. Significantly, the collection’s founding occurred in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, in which civil rights activists from Mississippi played a pivotal role. When there was not the convenience of 24/7 online access to vitally important public information, DSU’s mid-sized depository provided the physical information that the students, faculty, staff, and the local community needed. Its establishment as a collection was visionary, timely, and a true gift to the Mississippi Delta.

Michael Mounce (mmounce@deltastate.edu), Reference/Government Documents/Instructional Services Librarian, Roberts-LaForge Library, Delta State University. Laurie Muffley (lmuffley@deltastate.edu), Reference/Instructional Services Librarian, Roberts-LaForge Library, Delta State University. Mike Emerson (memerson@deltastate.edu), Electronic Resources Librarian, Roberts-LaForge Library, Delta State University.

Notes

1. Arthur S. Flemming et al., School Desegregation in Greenville, Mississippi: A Staff Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: US Government Publishing Office, 1977).
2. Arthur S. Flemming et al., Twenty Years After Brown: A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: US Government Publishing Office, 1977); Arthur S. Fleming et al., Consultations on the Affirmative Action Statement of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: US Government Publishing Office, 1981); US Department of Defense, Voting Assistance Guide 1990–1991 (Washington, DC: US Government Publishing Office, 1990).
3. Dr. Rush Miller, letter to the Library Division of the Superintendent of Documents, Washington, DC, July 21, 1975.
4. Dr. Rush Miller, Statement of Justification for the Designation of the W.B. Roberts Library, Delta State University, As a U.S. Government Documents Depository Library, letter to the Library Division of the Superintendent of Documents, Washington, DC, 1975.
5. C. A. LaBarre, letter to Dr. Rush Miller, October 23, 1975.
6. C .A LaBarre, form to Dr. Rush Miller, October 23, 1975.
7. “DSU Library Now Depository for Government Documents,” The Clarion Ledger Jackson Daily News, January 18, 1976.
8. “Our Changing Population: Bolivar County, Mississippi,” USA Facts, updated July 2022, https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/our-changing-population/state/mississippi/county/bolivar-county