Mission and Policies of Government Information - The University Libraries

Mission and Policies - Government Information Service

General

Jackson Library is a full service depository of both United States and State of North Carolina government publications. Reference and Government Information staff design and maintain over 160 Internet, World Wide Web sites for access to government information, allowing access by patrons at any time of the day or night, from any place in the world. Within the department and the library, there are dozens of Internet connected computer workstations available to the public, and reader/printer equipment is also available for those publications in microform.

Service

The watchword of the department staff and student assistants is very simply SERVICE. We provide exemplary service to any and all patrons, including the general public, who come to us for help, and that service is not limited even to our own resources or our own collection. If a patron has an information problem which can be solved within our department, we solve it here, without the necessity of ever sending that patron to another department for help. We make it a rule of practice that we never, under any circumstances, send a patron to another place or department within the library, if their problem can be solved by our staff. In accomplishing this goal, we take the most direct path to an information solution, whether it be via our paper or microform collection, our many reference sources, or our very sophisticated Web access sites for government information. When a patron leaves our department, we want that patron to feel as though they have been provided the most effective reference and information service possible.

In order to accomplish the above stated goal, we feel that it is necessary for as many of our government publications as possible appear as full records in the library online catalog. Catalog records for both North Carolina and United States publications now reach back into the 1970’s, with more records being added each month. We feel that each and every U.S. government web site publication which is available to the general public should be available via our online catalog, and this type of record was recently added to our catalog record profile for this monthly service. In the future, more and more U.S. government publications available via the World Wide Web will thus be available directly from our online catalog, with hyperlinks to the material.

We feel very strongly that a major part of our information service must be education and Instruction, and such service must be available to the ANYONE. Iinstruction services are aggressively promoted with university faculty and students, AND even with outside groups such as the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce, for which we have done several information workshops. Such services have also been provided for many other local groups and organizations, in an outreach effort which is ongoing. We believe that it is our responsibility to offer such service to virtually any group or organization which desires and requests it, believing that, in the process, we will be promoting the best interests of the UNCG community of scholarship and the services mandated by the Federal Depository Library Service.

Collections

The heart of the government information collection of this department is the U.S. Government Depository collection and the North Carolina State depository collection. We are approximately a 80% depository for United States government materials and a 100% depository for North Carolina materials. In addition, we also house microform and online collections of British Parliamentary materials, including Hansard and Sessional Papers. With respect to the United States Government Depository collection, it is the policy of this department to select any category of U.S. Government material which will be of potential use to our university and/or local community, being limited by space and staff considerations only. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro is a research institution which offers degrees through the doctoral level in many fields, and the depository collection must reflect the great breadth and variety of these academic offerings.