Thanks to Jennifer Klang, Deputy Project Manager / Head of Reference Services, Department of the Interior Library, for the this article: Reports, Hearings and Debates, oh my! The Electronic Future of Legislative History at the Department of the Interior Library. This article was originally published in the 2009 Best Practices for Government Librarians: Change: Managing It, Surviving It, Thriving on It. The 2009 edition includes 60 articles and other submissions provided by more than 50 contributors from librarians in government agencies, courts, and the military, as well as from professional association leaders, LexisNexis Consultants, and more.
Read on...
It’s sometimes difficult for me to believe I’ve been working in libraries for over 10 years. Really, 10 years isn’t that long but the technology is so different now, I sometimes feel like I have trouble keeping up. These days, librarianship is all about keeping up with the most useful trends in technology. The mantra seems to be change, change, change…When I sat down to write an article about change, I felt it was important to give some thought to where I had personally experienced change within my own organization. As the head of reference services, I have seen a great deal of change in the methodology and structure of research in our library. On further reflection, I decided that the most significant area of change that had personally touched my reference skills had to be legislative history. After all, I receive a legislative history question, of some variety, nearly every day. Many researchers, be they attorneys, librarians, or graduate students, fail to understand the importance of legislative history until they are forced to deal with a project that involves these complex documents. Often, when researchers arrive at the library with a question about why legislation ended up in the US Code with certain language, they are unaware that what they are actually looking for is a legislative history. My job has been to guide them to the resources that provide the answers to these questions. The way in which I do this has changed greatly. As a reference librarian at the Department of Interior Library, I have had the pleasure of working with individuals from varied backgrounds. Although our primary patron group is our departmental employees, we also assist individuals from law firms, members of the public, and students. The legislative history questions we receive range from requests for specific House and Senate Reports to every document attached to a given piece of legislation and its amendments. While the actual documents included in the legislative history haven’t changed, our methods for retrieving and researching these documents certainly have. We are now integrating a number of new electronic research tools into our legislative history research.
When I teach my legislative history class at the DOI library, I often mention that these new electronic tools provide a great new delivery system for government documents. Like a quiver full of newly sharpened arrows they are precise and offer a “straight shot” to documents, but they are only as good as the marksman that shoots them. Legislative history researchers still need to learn the fundamentals of this area of research in order to be effective. They need to understand the body of a legislative history. When they sit down at a computer, and retrieve a cite list of documents from a database, they need to understand what they are looking at. When I began teaching legislative history courses at the DOI 4 years ago, I was still learning the ropes myself. Finally, now I know enough to help our patrons. While my course has changed somewhat from use of print resources to electronic services, I still spend a fair amount of time explaining the parts of a legislative history. Then, we discuss databases. While there still a number of items not yet available in electronic format, it seems that we are moving toward greater electronic coverage of government documents. This is great news for many researchers, particularly for those who don’t have ready access to these print resources through depository libraries or other institutions. It also provides patrons with alternative access points to additional documents that might not be found in standard book format.
In the past several years we have added several terrific database services that have now become part of our normal legislative history research at the library. These include LexisNexis Congressional Hearings and Research Digital Collection, a Presidential Libraries Database, a Congressional Record product and a digitized Serial Set product. This nearly covers everything we need:
- House, Senate and Conference Reports and Documents
- Congressional Debate
- Hearings
- Presidential Signing Statements
Often, I use more than one database to look for documents since coverage varies from one service to another. For example, while our particular serials set database containing Committee Reports and Documents began with the American State Papers (in 1789), and is currently loaded to the 1960’s, our Lexis product provides great coverage for more recent legislation. I always mention this to our researchers since many of them assume that checking one resource is a comprehensive search. It is important to know which database to use for the particular documents you need, as well as the coverage dates. It is also key for the librarian to keep up to date on the services they are providing since coverage can be added as documents are added to a collection. Today’s reference librarian also serves as the library’s authority on electronic resources. Librarians should try to encourage patrons to ask questions about the library’s electronic resources and their strengths and weaknesses. For example, the DOI library recently added a wonderful new resource from Lexis featuring the maps and other graphic materials from the US Serials Set. While our Serials Set database includes some of these items, the Lexis product has rounded out our coverage of items related to House, Senate and Committee Reports and Documents. Our patrons have been excited to see these maps available from their desktops.
Conducting a legislative history used to mean utilizing CIS indexes for both hearings and reports; and Congressional Record Indexes for debate. Now electronic searches are possible for all three. In some cases, when dealing with older materials, databases searches may only include citations. However, many database services such as LexisNexis Congressional are updated regularly, continually adding full-text content for older materials. I remind patrons, also, that citation searching alone (especially utilizing key terms) can also yield excellent sets of documents. One of the jobs of the reference librarian is to be aware of these updates and to advise patrons accordingly. The librarian may want to modify their searches slightly, broadening them to include a larger set of search terms or using keyword indexes provided by the database. Librarians should also remember to consider the age of the document and alternative spellings. At the DOI, we sometimes assist patrons with legislative history research related to Native American tribes dating back to the early 1800’s. We always try to consider alternative spellings of tribal groups, as we search for materials, since consistency is sometimes an issue. Also, every reference librarian should make an effort to learn the more complicated advance search functions available in all their databases. Spending 20 minutes every week, will save your patron time and frustration as you offer them suggestions in conducting more targeted searches that will be more effective.
Database searching has provided one additional benefit for the legislative history researcher. In addition to providing a quick list of citations (and sometimes full-text document access), databases also offer opportunities for serendipity that otherwise would not be available in the print environment. In an all-print environment, indexes and other finding aids provide access to a single legislative history document by cross-referencing several access points. These might include: bill number, report/document number or controlled vocabulary subject. While all of these are important and useful, they don’t allow for the flexibility that electronic searching offers, especially to the impatient researcher used to having everything at their fingertips. While I have always been a fan of controlled vocabulary and indexing, I have also been a librarian long enough to know that these are concepts that almost never find their way to the end-user. In the modern Google environment of today, users don’t want to take the time to figure out if the terms they are using are the most effective and they often don’t ask the librarian how to use the tools provided for them. When a patron sits down to run a search in a Congressional reports database for a specific item, for example, they have a number of search options. Not only can they use bill numbers or report numbers, they also have the option of using standard language to search. In some cases, this can yield other relevant documents – drawn from other legislation – that otherwise would never come up. Many researchers using our databases to conduct legislative history have commented on how many “terrific finds” they have uncovered in the process of looking for a single report. In cases where items are available in full-text, users have the added benefit of searching throughout the document as well. Recently I conducted some legislative history research, from the mid-19th century, on a little-known Indian tribe. Originally, my search began as an inquiry for a copy of a Senate Report believed to mention the tribe. In the process of searching for that document, however, I unearthed several other valuable reports and a hearing that were very useful to the patron. They were delighted, since both of the items I located had only briefly mentioned the group in a small section of the document. Neither document provided subject indexing that tied these items to the tribe’s name, and neither was linked to the legislation we originally reviewed. Without the electronic search capabilities available to us through the database, we would never have known that these reports were relevant. The availability of electronic search has certainly been helpful in providing a valuable new access point into legislative history documents, forcing us to look differently at how we access documents and conduct research for (and with) our patrons.
This is a general summary of how change has come to the world of legislative history research for one librarian. The growth of change and, with it, the expectations of our users, has grown tremendously over the past 7 years. However, I feel prepared to move forward and poised to take on these new challenges. I feel that our skills, as reference librarians, are needed as much in today’s environment as ever before. Our skills as instructors and “suggestors” provides us with an opportunity to prove our value to our institutions every day. Rapid change in library technology is likely to be the norm in the future, not only in reference service, but in all areas of librarianship. Those of us on the front lines should work hard to continue our own education, taking advantage of learning opportunities offered by vendors and by our local library association chapters. Armed and ready, we can take on the future feeling prepared and empowered as we move forward in our careers. Go forward librarians, and change!
