For the People
Government Information Services helps keep
Vanderbilt and Nashville informed

By Bonnie Arant Ertelt

Question: Which of the following is published by the Federal government? a) information on which political action committees are giving money to candidates; b) tax forms; c) a brochure on the Grand Canyon; d) the magazine Civilization; e) all of the above.
If you answered "all of the above," you'd be correct. But the first four selections above barely illustrate the incredible diversity of material made available on a daily basis by the Government Printing Office, known as the GPO, and its primary disseminators, the more than 1,300 Federal depository libraries. This system, mandated by Congress and nearly 140 years old, makes available to the public everything from congressional hearings to statistics on virtually any subject to that yearly inevitability, the Form 1040.

Larry Romans and Gretchen Dodge Photo by David Crenshaw

The Federal depository at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library, known as Government Information Services, became a depository in 1884. (A smaller depository focusing on legal materials was added at the Law Library in 1976.) Government Information Services receives about 60% of what the GPO distributes and serves as a subregional depository for congressional hearings, meaning they are working to have a copy of every hearing ever published by the GPO.
"We focus on three main areas," says Larry Romans, the government information librarian and political science bibliographer, "Congress, the Office of the President, and the Department of State. But we have a fascinating array of old and current material here. People don't realize that the United States government is the world's largest collector and producer of statistics. That's one of the things we use to pull people back here. They may see one citation, but once they're here, we can show them all kinds of things."
Some piece of information from every agency and department in the Federal government finds its way to the Vanderbilt depository, from reports on Tennessee soils by the Agriculture Department to botany studies from the Smithsonian Institution. Based on a selection profile determined by Romans and his assistant, Gretchen Dodge, and grounded on users' needs, Government Information Services receives about 30,000 documents during the year. Most of the documents stay at Central, though some are distributed to other libraries in the Heard system. The documents are numbered, not in standard Library of Congress call numbers, but according to a system determined by the Superintendent of Government Documents in Washington, DC. Additionally, the department is the only full United Nations depository in six surrounding states.
With so much material and a classification system unlike the rest of the library, Government Information Services constitutes its own library within a library. And it's an area of library and information science that requires a special interest by those willing to learn its labyrinthine ways.
Luckily for Vanderbilt, the backbone of the Heard Library's government information department is Romans and Dodge. Romans started as a student assistant in government documents in 1964 at Stetson University in Florida, where he received his undergraduate degree, and has worked in government information since then. Dodge began her work with government documents in 1985 at the Central Library.
"I've been a student assistant, a library assistant in government documents, and now a government documents librarian for 17 years here at Vanderbilt, 14 of those as department head," says Romans. "When I started, none of the documents were included in online or card catalogs, and you had to use the GPO's Monthly Catalog and some really difficult finding tools to get at them. In the mid-70s, the GPO began using standard subject headings and putting the Monthly Catalog in electronic form, so that tapes could be created to load into online catalogs. That made finding things much easier."
"Those were the dark ages," says Dodge, of the time before the Monthly Catalog was electronic. "But we just started recording documents online about four years ago, rather than checking them in on shelf list cards. So, cataloging has been electronic for some time here—there's no way we can individually catalog 30,000 documents a year—but check-in has just recently been updated."
The Heard Library's government information Web site was recently named one of the 26 principal starting points in the country for finding government information by Gregg R. Notess in the third edition of Government Information on the Internet. In June alone, the page had 11,000 hits—second only to the Library's home page.
Despite all this use of government information both on campus and nationwide, Congress proposed a 61% reduction to the GPO budget for the year. "It required a tremendous effort to put most of that money back," says Romans, "but the GPO still ended up with a significant reduction. As a result, they now don't have much choice but to offer information only in electronic resources. It costs too much money to produce both electronic and paper versions."
Using electronic resources to access government information certainly has advantages. "The most obvious is that you don't have to be in the library to find things. Another is that they update information much more quickly online. It might take us six months to receive a paper update," says Romans, "but it takes a day to post an electronic update."
On the other hand, the availability of government information only through electronic resources does not always assure that it will be available to everyone, which makes it difficult to uphold the motto of the GPO—"Keeping America Informed."
"Not everyone has the same access to computers," explains Romans. "There are definitely information haves and have nots. So the haves will have access to more and more information, and the have nots will have access to less and less information. Also, virtually anyone can look in the index of a book and find information, but because the government contracts out to the lowest bidder, you end up with electronic products that use hundreds of different kinds of software. We have trouble staying on top if it, so the idea that the general public can do that is unrealistic. And there are the logistics—if you have a class using 20 books, everyone can be at work, but if the information is only available online and we have only four terminals, then people are five deep waiting to use the terminals. So, there are definite pluses and minuses."
It is extremely important to both of these veterans that the information remain available to anyone who wants or needs access to it, from Vanderbilt nursing students working on a class project on community needs assessment to a member of the Nashville community checking regulations in place as a result of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
"The thing that most impresses me about this information," says Dodge, "is that these are the original sources. They're THE original transcripts to the hearings, THE testimonies, THE speeches given by the President, THE laws. Even the statistics. It may be that the Department of Labor or the Treasury are the only places that collect a particular piece of information. And we have it right here in Government Information."

This article first appeared in the Winter 2001 issue of The Acorn Chronicle.