Service Response Discussion: Government Information
August 29th, 2006 by Andrea MercadoThis post is part of a series designed to further discussion of the PLA Results service responses, designed in 1998 to describe “what a library does for, or offers to, the public in an effort to meet a set of well-defined community needs.”
The bulleted comments below were gathered in conference sessions by the PLA Results team, in an effort to update the current service responses, which were originally written almost ten years ago. The PLA Results group is looking to the community for feedback on how to update these service responses to better reflect current public library methods and standards.
“The library that offers Government Information service helps satisfy the need for information about elected officials and governmental agencies that enable people to participate in the democratic process.” (definition care of the PLA Results site). The current version of the Government Information service response, is available for review on the PLA Results web site (the file is an Adobe .pdf file, and requires Adobe Reader to view).
Share your feedback on the Government Information service response, as well as the starter comments listed below, by leaving a comment on this post page. You can help PLA Results bring public library service responses into the 21st century!
Government Information Discussion Group Comments
Should this be dropped from the list?
- This needs to go.
- This is not needed.
- This is just a part of General Information and should be deleted.
Go back to the Service Response Discussion Index.
Tags: PLA, PLA Blog, service responses
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October 20th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
[...] Government Information (0 comments) [...]
October 23rd, 2006 at 4:01 pm
I absolutely disagree that this service response should be scrapped and/or rolled into the General Information service response. Information on elected officials from a broad range of viewpoints, in addition to information that governments themselves publish, is absolutely critical for an informed citizenry. Keeping this as a separate service response shows that the library community recognizes the importance of providing solid information on elected officials and the bureaucracies they run as a critical service to the public.
October 24th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Agree that it shouldn’t be stand-alone. Had much discussion about it during two planning processes and both times concluded that it was a subset of General Information.
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:18 am
The argument has apparently been made that the Government Information service response should be subsumed under General Information. If that is true, then it seems the Business and Career Information, Consumer Information, and Local History and Genealogy responses should be likewise subsumed. I would counter that, of these responses, Government Information most deserves to retain its standing because of the fact that public libraries were founded to assure that citizens are informed about governmental matters so that we can effectively participate in our democracy. In my opinion, this is one of our most valuable roles.
In recent years we have seen extreme changes in terms of misinformation, disinformation, and access to information by and about our government: from foot-dragging in the release of presidential papers to the reclassification of public documents; from closed-door policy sessions with industry insiders to the dismissal of scientific and expert consensus; from domestic spying and data-mining to using federal funds to pay journalists to write propaganda; from gagging reproductive-health speech of international agencies that receive U.S. funds to gagging the speech of U.S. citizens under the Patriot Act. And this is to say nothing of the manipulated intelligence that led to the war in Iraq — or the culpability of the mainstream media which has too often perpetuated and/or failed to investigate erroneous claims. Now is not the time to abandon this central service response.