"Perfectly fascinating"
Take a celebration of the centennial of the Dartmouth library's designation as a federal depository for U.S. government documents. Schedule it on a gorgeous fall Saturday morning in an underground lecture hall. Yawn.
Yet 75 people were intrigued enough by that event, on September 21, to forgo foliage for folios. And the three hours of panel discussions, presentations, and talks included lots of amusing anecdotes and raised some serious policy issues, evoking both spontaneous laughter and spirited applause from the audience.
The first question a non-librarian might ask is what is a government document. The surgeon general's historic report on smoking and health is one in the Baker collection; the Three Mile Island commission report is another. The rubric of government documents also includes such things as USDA pamphlets on gardening, transcripts of Congressional hearings, and census data.
Dartmouth is one of some 1,400 depositories for government documents nationwide and one of only a handful of centenarians in New England. A historical perspective on federal depositories was provided by Michael F. DiMario, national superintendent of documents. The idea of making important government documents available to citizens had its beginnings when the country was only 37 years old, and copies of legislative actions were sent to state legislatures and state historical societies. Now, the office for which DiMario is responsible distributes 32 million copies of 62,000 titles a year. Publications are available free of charge to depository libraries, but in return the institutions must keep documents for a certain period and must make them available to the public. DiMario concluded with a discussion of what he termed "warfare" in Washington about jurisdiction over dissemination of electronic forms of information.
A panel of four academics then gave insight into various ways they use government documents. Michael J. Birkner, a historian and the editorial writer for the Concord Monitor, used government documents extensively in researching a biography he wrote on Samuel Southard, a 19th-century secretary of the Navy. Birkner said he'd come across government documents ranging from the weighty to the frivolous: from transcripts of landmark Congressional debates to letters in which Southard advised ship captains on ways to ease sailors' homesickness. But he emphasized the usefulness of such a range of material. Birkner also noted a drawback of doing research in the electronic age. Historians have a good deal of insight into Abraham Lincoln's thought processes when he wrote the Gettysburg Address because crossed-out and added words are preserved in drafted and redrafted manuscripts. But in speeches written on a computer terminal, only the final, perfect copy goes down to history because changes are made on a floppy disk, without leaving any trace of the writer's first thoughts. Dartmouth Professor of Economics Colin Campbell spoke about the importance of government participation in the preparation of statistical data. He said only non-profit groups or trade associations, besides the government, have the base from which to gather broad economic data. He said it is "perfectly fascinating" what can be deduced from seemingly impenetrable documents, pointing to assumptions about the underground economy which can be drawn from a table of paper money circulation. Ngina Lythcott, the College's affirmative action officer, spoke about her use of government documents in conducting research for her doctoral dissertation on health maintenance organizations. She as did all the panelists had highest accolades for the Baker government documents staff. The concluding panelist was Frank Smallwood, government professor and director of the Rockefeller Center; he spoke about his use of government documents as a consumer, as a teacher, and as a researcher.
Next, two undergraduates, members of the Forensic Union, gave a mock debate to illustrate their use of government documents. A dazzling array of facts, figures, and quotations studded their presentation.
The final speaker was Joe Morehead, an associate professor of library and information science at the State University of New York at Albany. He spoke on the relationship between government information and public policy in a talk entitled "Abridging Government Information: The Reagan Administration's War on Waste." The War on Waste, begun in late 1983, is intended to save money through elimination, consolidation, or reduction in the frequency of government publications deemed "trivial, frivolous, wasteful, or duplicative." Morehead expressed concern over the effects of the measure. He addressed the issue first with levity: "A document discarded as worthless will be vital shortly after the trash is picked up." He went on in a more serious vein, saying that while some targeted titles have probably been unnecessary, "many [eliminated or reduced] publications are far from trivial"; he cited as examples Pesticides Monitoring Journal and Healthcare Financing Trends.
Morehead also noted the impression of policy bias given by lists of eliminated titles, "many of which contain words and phrases like solar, environmental quality, Veterans' benefits, blacks, disabled, education loans, and women." He said he feels it "far exceeds the mandate to discard unnecessary bulletins like Spring Lawn Care to discard themes no longer politically appropriate in the eyes of the administration.... I wonder if they actively sought the advice of users and disseminators of government publications."
The Dartmouth centennial celebration would clearly have been a good place to find a group of enthusiastic and informed users and disseminators, among them Robert Jaccaud, senior reference librarian at Baker, and MiMi Gurphey, government documents specialist, who organized the event.
