Announcements
There are no libraries with more experience in dealing with the websites of federal, state, and tribal governments than FDLP libraries. In the current climate of the FDLP we need to increase our customer base, and as libraries serving the people who live in our Congressional Districts you should consider creating a teaching guide that you can use to teach E-government resources to the libraries in your area. In our state, Oklahoma, and I would bet throughout our nation, the current #1 topic of interest in our E-government workshops (instructors are myself and Robbie Sittel, Tulsa City-County Library) is How to Get a Job closely followed by How to Get Unemployment Benefits. We teach the State sources first, the Federal sources second. This is almost half of our current E-govt workshop.
FYI here are the other parts of our workshop in their (current) order:
USA.gov
IRS (not just forms but services also)
FEMA
FAFSA (may not be necessary in every geography depending on whether a campus/town has a local FAFSA assistance office)
Medicare
SSA
VA
USCIS (may not necessary in every geography depending on the local influx of immigrants into that geography)
Forms.gov
Throughout this 3-hour workshop we also talk about the management of E-govt services in general (this happens at the start) and for each website as we teach the website.
Offering this type of instruction may at first seem to you that it is more of something that a public library should do rather than an academic library. This is true, but it is also true that our offering of services to the people of our Congressional Districts is a public library type of service regardless of whether we work in a public, state, tribal, or academic library. This is the public library type of work that every Selective or Regional Depository should offer.
