2024 GODORT Annual Meeting Summaries

Find below recaps provided by committee chairs of their committees’ meetings at the 2024 GODORT Annual Meetings, held virtually the week of June 10.—Kian Flynn

Government Information for Children (GIC)

The Government Information for Children Committee discussed the ongoing National History Day LibGuide project and aims to have a guide with resources for this year’s theme available by the start of the school year. Members of GIC will work on this guide through the summer. The committee also discussed presenting for HELP! and GPO.

Legislation

We had a short meeting in June. Two main points: a draft of updated language for GODORT’s FDLP Advocacy Plan was presented by Sarah Causey. Lisa Pritchard reported on the extension of the liaison model used with ALA’s Committee on Legislation and GODORT’s Legislation Committee to the Chief Officers of State Libraries.

Membership

The GODORT Membership Committee provided recommendations to update the membership section of the GODORT Policy and Procedures Manual. The committee created a database of GODORT members and updated it continually. We contacted new members via ALA Connect, welcomed them to GODORT, and provided them with information about ways to get involved with GODORT. In addition, we created and distributed a very brief survey to find out new members’ interest regarding involvement in GODORT activities and committees. The Membership Committee investigated the possibility of developing a special webinar for ALA’s Public Library Association (PLA) and Reference & User Services Association (RUSA)—the free webinar would inform those attending about the ways that GODORT can help them answer government information queries. Finally, we made a promotional GODORT rack flier for ALA Connect Lounge and made it available during the ALA annual convention in San Diego.

Rare and Endangered Government Publications Committee

The major discussion item at the Rare and Endangered Government Publications Committee meeting focused on the need to easily identify item-level holdings data for historic government serials. REGP Chair Bonnell shared a case study identifying OCLC holdings statements from print government serials titles (https://bit.ly/regpholdings). Findings revealed that (1) few libraries have complete holdings for the oldest government serials, (2) from among those serial titles investigated, the number of physical copies is decreasing, and (3) many of these titles are not geographically dispersed. Discussion highlighted the need for preservation and the possibility of REGP seeking grant funding to further explore holdings data. The Committee also considered potential opportunities to align the preservation of historic government titles with the new GODORT Preservation Grant.

Federal Information Interest Group (FIIG)

The Federal Information Interest Group (FIIG) meeting included a presentation by Lauren Hall, Metadata Librarian at California State University, Stanislaus, titled “Gov Guide Glow-up: Creative Tips for a New Look.” In 2023, CSU Stanislaus won the inaugural Federal Depository Library Website of the Year award for its clear categories of information, ease of navigation, and its benefits to students, faculty, staff, and the community in accessing information. In her presentation, Lauren discussed how the guide was initially redesigned. Additionally, she showcased other pages with fun designs and topics that were created using tools like Adobe Express, Canva, and Genially to make these pages interesting and aesthetically pleasing.

International Documents Task Force (IDTF)

This committee’s meeting started with updates from 5 publishers/vendors focused on the International Governmental Organizations (IGOs): OECD Publications, World Bank Publications/Digital Publishing, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Publications, the United Nations (UN) Dag Hammarskjöld Library, United Nations (UN) Publications, and Coherent Digital, LLC. These updates were followed by a special instruction session jointly taught by Jim Church of University of California, Berkeley and Mike McCaffrey of Western University. The title of the session was “Core Competencies for International Documents: What You Need To Learn.” This 45-minute session covered the knowledge, skills, and competencies librarians must develop to act as an IGO documents librarian. The teaching session was followed by a 5-minute Q&A with the audience.

State & Local

The State and Local Documents Interest Group met along with the State Documents Collaborative Group, a GODORT affiliate, on June 12. The meeting was an open discussion on the problem many of us have of our state agencies no longer presenting statistical data in a traditional report can be captured. Much of this statistical data is now presented in interactive formats that cannot be captured for documents collections. There was good participation among the 34 attendees.