American Library Association Government Documents Round Table Education Committee GODORT Handout Exchange and Clearinghouse Statement for Contributors

BASIC PURPOSES AND INFORMATION

The Handout Exchange is project of the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) of the American Library Association (ALA). The exchange is a collection of guides to government information sources written by library staff across the country and distributed by the GODORT's Education Committee. The guides are arranged by broad subject classification. Each is identified with a brief title, author, library affiliation, and date of GODORT distribution (rather than date of publication).

The Handout Exchange was created in 1989 as a forum for the exchange of ideas and for resource sharing among librarians working with government information. We actively promote education and training, bibliographic control of documents, and public access to government information at all levels of government.

The Government Information and Depository Management Clearinghouse was created in 1996, when Jack Sulzer donated his CIS/Documents to the People Award money to establish a continuing education fund to be used for the support of projects to develop electronic and distance education resources. GITCO and the Education Committee worked together to set up this web-based information source, which has been under the supervision of the GODORT Education Committee.

In 2004 the Education Committee decided that due to overlapping content, the Clearinghouse and the Handout Exchange could be updated and combined. A committee was created to edit the two databases, select older material to be archived, and initiate procedures to combine the two databases. The two operated with a combined name for two years, with links back and forth, and in 2006 the two were combined under the Handout Exchange aegis.

WHAT WE COLLECT

Potential contributors sometimes are hesitant to participate because they fear that their contribution may not be good enough. Since 1988 we've received hundreds of contributions. We have yet to find one that is perfect for all libraries nor one that is not helpful to anyone. Our purpose is to encourage resource sharing rather than evaluating contributions.

The Handout Exchange includes many types of finding aids and tools:

• Bibliographies, both general and historical
• User guides for electronic individual products, whether online, on disc, or any other format
• Census guides for print, CD-ROM, and Internet versions
• Collection development policies for government information departments
• General user introductions to government information and maps departments
• Government Information department policies on such topics as access, binding, Internet use, and reference
• Guides to U.S state, federal, and foreign governments as well as to non-governmental organizations and international organizations
• Internet finding aids, including general, subject, and title guides
• Laws and Legislation, both legislative sources and specific products
• Map user guides, collection development policies, and processing
• Processing procedures and cataloging of government information
• Tutorials and guides to reference training for Government Information Courses taught in Library Schools
• Self-studies and annual reports of federal depository libraries
• State and local governments finding aids
• Statistics guides
• Subject Guides from abortion to welfare reform

CURRENT FORMAT

If you have posted your contribution online, please use the URL submission form at the top of most GODORT Handout pages. You can update your contribution regularly without contacting us.

However, if you prefer to send ussubmit the text of your contribution, we prefer your contributions be created in notepad with text-only-with-line-breaks and sent as an e-mail attachment. This submission format will make it easier for those interested in adapting your work to import it into a html format. Please send us updated versions as you create them.

OLDER FORMATS

Formats have varied over time with web links added in 1997 and regularized through the creation of a URL submission form in 1998. The links can be identified by searching "weblink" (without the quotation marks) using either the search page or the find button on your web browser.

While most guides may be viewed on a monitor via the web, some of the text files do not completely display due to the width of their margins or in rare cases because they are only available in Word Perfect (.wpf or .w51) format. However, the guides can be transmitted in their entirety by downloading with a web interface. While the guides may be transferred to other word processing programs, you will need to add formatting (boldface, underlining, etc.)

Year	Format
1994	Text-Only-With-Linebreaks (.txt)
1995	Text-Only (.txt)
1996	Text-Only (.txt) Some Word (.doc) Some Word Perfect (.wpf,.w51)
1997	Text-Only-With-Linebreaks(.txt) Some Web
2001	Text Only (.txt) Web (.htm,.html) Web Address (.ppt,.pdf, .txt)

COPYRIGHT

The publications listed in the GODORT Handout Exchange may be protected by copyright, regardless of whether they carry a copyright statement. However, we encourage contributors to make it easy for other library staff to adopt contributions for their own use. As of June 2005, the GODORT Handout Exchange is utilizing the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5

Handouts with a red dot may be copied and adapted for noncommercial use if the original author is cited, as explained in the Creative Commons license. On the Handout Exchange submission form, please be sure to answer the following question:

WILL YOU ALLOW NON-COMMERCIAL COPYING OR ADAPTATION?

Permitted if Original Author Cited Request Author's Permission None

NOTE: The form automatically defaults to Permitted if Original Author is Citied.

If you adapt a guide that, be sure to credit the original author and use the same Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, including the CC Symbol and link to the license :

For example, at the bottom of the handout, note that "The original version of this finding aide was prepared by Ann Kennedy, San Francisco State University; the revised version was created by [your name]." 

For other handouts, contact the original author before borrowing or adapting large sections. Contributors are asked to keep their contact information current.

To promote the widest use and distribution of the contributions, we encourage you to allow adaptation for noncommercial use (citing the original author) without requiring your specific approval. Historically important handouts that were physically contributed to the web site are being archived separately from the main subject areas.

UPDATING YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS

We want to make the Handout Exchange as useful as possible. To do so, we need to have up-to-date contributions.

Different types of finding aids and other tools require different updating policies. A collection policy or self-study may require updating every few years; a weblink to a bibliography of government publications on terrorism may need to be updated much more often. The Education Committee will review the collection periodically and may purge contributions that are out-of-date, but we will attempt to warn you first. by posting a message on GOVDOC-L. If the committee cannot reach you, due to out of date contact information or for other reasons, we reserve the right to give the responsibility for updating the document to someone else. If you have submitted a URL, you can update it without sending us new version. If you sent us a text attachment, please send an updated attachment.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sincere thanks to the many people who have participated in this project, especially the library staff who generously shared their material; the GODORT EDUCATION COMMITTEE; LARRY ROMANS of Vanderbilt University who originated the handout exchange in 1989 and has tirelessly given himself to the project ever since; and GRACE YORK of the University of Michigan, who set up the Handout Exchange web page in 1994 as a gopher site and has worked to improve the site and the presentation of the contributions.

Additional guides for Internet distribution may be submitted to Larry Romans at: Central Government Information Department, Vanderbilt University Library, Nashville, TN 37240-0007. Guides may also be submitted to Grace York of the University of Michigan via e-mail.

We appreciate your considering contributing to the Exchange. Each contribution is a gift - not only to the person who adapts it, but also to you who created it and will now have a larger audience for your work.

Grace York, Documents Center
University of Michigan Library

http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/godort/about.htm