Government Documents and the News

from LLRX
By Peggy Garvin

Peggy Garvin of Garvin Information Consulting is author of The United States Government Internet Manual (Bernan Press) and Real World Research Skills (TheCapitol.Net).

Published August 15, 2006

If you have ever spent any time as a reference librarian, these seemingly harmless phrases so popular with journalists have one effect: your brain clicks into search-for-clues mode. Others might think the story is interesting, or not, but you are thinking “what’s the report title?” and “it’s from which agency? dated when?” Assembling clues to identify the documents alluded to in the story, you move on to thinking about how to get your hands on this report, or statement, or bill. Often, in the back of your mind (or is this just me?), you are shouting something like “just give us the bill number!” or “would it hurt you to specify this is draft legislation?” at the imagined reporter. I am not a journalist, I don’t know, but perhaps those details are left out of the story because they might bog it down with distracting detail. Or because someone handed the document to the reporter, who has no idea how others might get a copy. Maybe there is an assumption that most people are not interested in seeing a 200-page congressional report on pension plans or a commission report on the Postal Service. And if they are interested, they can always just ask a librarian.

In these cases, one website has come to our rescue for many years: Documents in the News from the University of Michigan Library’s Documents Center. Hot documents are organized by topic, such as "CIA Leak Investigation" and "Hamdan v. Rumsfeld." The site also has an archive of all of the newsworthy documents it has featured from 1995 to the present. The Michigan site does not attempt to collect everything, however. It’s a logical place to start; you just might not finish here. . . .