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Midwinter Meeting Minutes


Saturday, January 21, 2006 4:00–6:00 p.m.


Sheraton Gunter Hotel, Crystal Ballroom


Charles E. Malone, Coordinator


Jeff Knapp, Secretary

Coordinator Charles Malone called the meeting to order at 4:10 p.m. Present: Jenifer Abramson, Marcy Allen, Mary Gay Anderson, Hui Hua Chua, Brett Cloyd, Elaine Coppola, Dan Coyle, Jackie Druery, Patricia Finney, Christof Galli, James Gerard, Jennie Gerke, Gordon Grahame, David Griffiths, Samantha Hager, Katherine Holvoet, August Imholtz, Jr., Linda Johnson, Anna Korhonen, David Loiterstein, Amy Stewart Mailhiot, Elizabeth Margutti, Kevin McClure, Andrea Morrison, Catherine Morse, David Oldencamp, Sandy Peterson, Aimee C. Quinn, Robert Rohrbacher, Bruce Samuelson, Helen Sheehy, Sara Shriner, Lynne M. Stuart, Louis Takacs, Donna Tolson, Triinu Tombak, Amy West, Susan White, Grace York

The agenda and the Annual 2005 Minutes were distributed and approved.

Committee Liaison Reports

Cataloging Committee: Robert Rohrbacher reported. The committee meeting will be held on Sunday and will include an update from GPO regarding new separate formats.

Education Committee:Jenifer Abramson reported. Meeting will be held on Sunday, where they will continue to work on defining competencies for documents librarians, and the 2006 program on Information Literacy.

Government Information and Technology Committee: Brett Cloyd reported. The meeting will be held on Sunday, where they will discuss the Digital Projects Clearinghouse and whether GPO will have items available.

Legislation Committee: Amy Stewart-Mailhiot reported. There two resolutions regarding IRS tax forms being considered. Committee will be meeting again on Sunday.

Program Committee: Elizabeth Margutti reported. There will be no preconference at 2006 Annual. Discussed a Policy and Procedure Manual on Friday, and trying to get a checklist together. They are meeting again on Monday to talk about the program ideas for 2007. More than one preconference is being considered since there will be none held this year.

Publications Committee: Marcy Allen reported. They will be meeting on Sunday to discuss the hosting of the GODORT website, get a report from
DTTP, discuss a new editing team, and a proposal from Andrea Morrison.

Rare and Endangered Government Publications Committee: Catherine Morse reported. The committee will be meeting on Sunday to discuss a Serial Set inventory and book project, endangered 1932-1962 federal documents projects, and the use of paper and ink scanners.

IFLA: Jackie Druery reported. She attended the IFLA annual meeting in Oslo . Six papers were presented and there is a report on the meeting in
DTTP on their conference. IFLA’s strategic plan has been posted on their website. A call for proposals is out for Seoul , South Korea, and the deadline isFebruary 10, 2006. Further details are available on the IFLA website.

Agency Liaison Program: Susan White, coordinator, passed around copies of reports. There is continued movement by some agencies to do joint publishing projects, and she mentioned there are current openings in the program.

Reports from Vendors/Agencies

Readex (August Imholtz): Readex is continuing to study the feasibility of digitizing the Foreign Broadcast Information Service daily and weekly reports starting back in 1939. The FBIS was started in 1939 to monitor Nazi broadcasts and is a truly massive collection today. He estimated that the collection includes 6.885 billion publications. Readex has convinced the FBIS to hold off sending these materials to a storage facility in Kansas City while they study the feasibility.

LexisNexis (Dan Coyle): LexisNexis has signed an agreement with the United Nations for their statistical publications, which will start loading in the next few months. They are starting an Inter-Governmental Organization collection that should have 90% of all documents that will be a part of LexisNexis Statistical.

Bernan (Bruce Samuelson): Bernan is close to signing an agreement for the publication of a number of new titles from IGOs. Titles of interest are listed in the Agency Liaison Reports.

Center for Research Libraries (Patricia Finney): The full MARC cataloging of foreign official gazettes material is set to begin in February or March 2006. Also being cataloged are 400,000 doctoral dissertations. Recent acquisitions of note are Empire & Commonwealth Part 1, German Colonial Archives, Immigration and Refugee Services of America, Russian archives from the Russo-Japanese War. Check the CRL website for updates.

Old Business

2006 Annual Meeting Preconference will not take place in New Orleans . While it was not an easy decision, it was made with the best information available at the time about the status of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

New Business

Promoting GODORT Membership and Services IDTF Can Offer: The general consensus was that these two topics were interconnected, so both were discussed as a single idea. The following concepts and points of view emerged:

• GODORT membership has been declining dramatically due to documents departments disappearing and documents positions changing so much
  
  
  
  
• Government documents are hard to sell because they are not “sexy” enough. The government connection needs to be de-emphasized in order to be successful. The perceptions of the public have changed by the ability to access so much on the web. The public needs to be informed of the benefit documents can provide them as generalists.
  
  
  
  
• The “free-ness” of documents should be emphasized. Perhaps a web module or webcast for people to “attend” to learn who the experts are in documents.
  
  
  
  
• A clearinghouse for international documents handouts would be useful.
  
  
  
  
• Public perception of the term “documents:” public doesn’t quite know what they are and the name puts people off. Documents must be emphasized as necessary sources for all research. GODORT and IDTF should work with publishers and distributors to expand exposure to the public.
  
  
  
  
• Documents can be more difficult to find when they are all on the web. Documents librarians have a responsibility to show the public how to mine the websites of the U.N. and other organizations, and to share their understanding.
  
  
  
  
• Documents librarians need to come up with a way to help people make the connection between
  what is published and
  who is publishing it.
  
  
  
  
• Analogy was made that GODORT should become more like a “virus” and less like an “organ.” Rather than be a standalone body, it should be reaching out into all other areas of ¾«¶«´«Ã½and the information world.
  
  
  
  
• A training need exists as older documents librarians retire with their skills. It is important to get information out to
  all librarians.
  
  
  
  
• Perhaps an occasional papers series would be effective. A foundation for such a series exists.
  
  
  
  

David Griffiths moved that an ad-hoc group be formed to investigate how GODORT-IDTF might better serve its members and the profession as a whole, presenting its findings at Annual 2006. The chair of the group would be appointed by the IDTF Coordinator.

Christof Galli offered an amendment: that the group focus its attention on three areas:

• Educational, or “Train the Trainer;”
  
  
  
  
• Marketing/Outreachand
  
  
  
  
• Collection Development.
  
  
  
  

The amendment was accepted. The motion carried unanimously.

Preconference for 2007: Coordinator Charles Malone distributed the proposal for the 2007 Preconference to be held in Washington, D.C.: “It’s a Small World After All: The Globalization of International Documents, the United Nations, European Union, Organization of American States, and Beyond.” It would be 1½ days, beginning at 8:00 a.m. on Thursday and ending at 1:00 p.m. on Friday.

After a brief discussion of issues such as what type of facility would be desirable, and whether or not Continuing Education credits would be offered, David Oldencamp moved to move forward with the Preconference as proposed. The motion carried unanimously.

Additional New Business: Grace York, University of Michigan, needs additional guides and tutorials for the Clearinghouse. Helen Sheehy, Penn State University and an editor of
DTTP, announced that
DTTP is looking for more international-focused articles, especially articles written by authors from other countries.

The meeting was adjourned at 5:57 p.m.

Respectfully Submitted,

Jeff Knapp

IDTF Secretary