If you’re one of our regular readers, you already know how fond we are of government documents. So you can imagine how our virtual pulse quickened when we encountered this large and beautiful collection of government-oriented subject guides covering everything from Acronyms to Worldwide Demographic Information.
Mixed in with the actual guides are links to such key resources as The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance and earthquake/seismic info from the U.S. Geological Survey. But sometimes, when you expect a direct link to a resource, you get a nice surprise. For example, click on the link for the Government Accountability Office, and you are taken to a page that explains what it is, what it does, and how to use it, including integration with the local OPAC.
The subject guides themselves comprise collections of links to agencies, databases, reports and other items, with brief annotations. There are some unusual collections here, including:
+ Ask an Expert!, including links to “Ask an Expert” pages at many different agencies, including the Census Bureau, the National Park Service, and NASA. This unusual aggregation is a clever idea.
+ Kids Pages from various agencies (including the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Who knew?)
+ Declassified Documents, from the U.S. and other countries.
+ Statistical Information by State
+ Technical Reports — a nice compendium, which also includes links to subscription databases accessible to the university community.
Just cruising through some of these guides, we reacquainted ourselves with valuable resources that we haven’t visited for awhile. For example, in the Charities guide, we found a link to the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics, which we’d quite forgotten about. And the Religion Statistics guide is an excellent compendium of sites we know about and use regularly — e.g., Adherents.com — and The Pluralism Project at Harvard University, which we think is new to us. (Look at this collection of “in-depth profiles of individual religious centers,” which can be sorted by state or by religious tradition.)
Be aware that not every link in every subject guide is to an official government agency. But research institutions, think tanks, etc., also provide valuable information, and we’re glad to see that they were included as well.
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