Government Information is Open: How Educators Can Incorporate Resources That Expand Our Borders

Presenter Information

Laurie Aycock, Kennesaw State UniversityFollow
Valerie D. Glenn, Virginia Commonwealth University
Emily Rogers, Valdosta State University

Presentation Type

Presentation

Location

Zoom

Start Date

17-4-2024 2:00 PM

End Date

17-4-2024 2:55 PM

Description

Those of us who work in academic or public libraries and educational settings are accustomed to having access to a wide range of online resources, many of which are subscription-based; they are “behind borders.” However, what happens especially when students graduate and go on to their post-college lives away from such ready access? Government information resources are a means of addressing the disparity in information availability, allowing us all to “grow beyond our borders.” These resources, in addition to being well-researched, engaging, and often fun, offer educational benefits and help address inequities in information access. Not everyone has access to college- or university-provided commercial databases, but almost all federal, state, and local government-provided online resources are freely available to anyone with computer and internet access. The resources in business, science and technology, and the humanities and social sciences covered here introduce freely available government information sources that can complement classroom instruction and help entrepreneurs in any arena, while also facilitating lifelong learning. There are still serious imbalances in technological access, so freely available government information - or any open educational resource - is not a cure-all for information inequity, but it's a step towards helping to alleviate information impoverishment. We hope you'll be able to use what you discovered in this presentation to enhance your own and others' future learning.

Author Bios

Laurie Aycock is the Government Information Librarian and a Librarian Associate Professor at Kennesaw State University Libraries in Marietta, Georgia. She has 15 years of experience in academic libraries, specializing in government documents. Her interests include collection diversity, cultivating welcoming library spaces, and promotion of government information collections.

Valerie D. Glenn is associate professor and Business and Public Affairs Collections Librarian at Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries in Richmond, Virginia. She has extensive experience working with government information, having served as the FDLP coordinator in several academic libraries and as a federal documents metadata analyst for HathiTrust. Her interests include the preservation of born-digital government information and how shared print initiatives can intersect with government publications.

Emily Rogers is a professor and Government Information Reference Librarian at Odum Library, Valdosta State University, in Valdosta, Georgia, where she has worked since 2006. She teaches the government information sources course for VSU’s MLIS program. Her interests include government information accessibility and promotion and students’ affective responses to research.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License