State government publications have long served as a vital source of information for government information professionals, state government officials and employees, and citizens. Checklists serve as guides to the publishing activities of state governments and, as such, they are both a valuable reference tool -- providing subject access to current government publications, and revealing the activities of various government agencies, and an indispensable acquisitions tool -- providing the timely information necessary to identify and order state publications that are printed in small quantities.
State government bibliographies have a venerable heritage as a separate publishing endeavor, beginning with R. R. Bowker's four volume set, entitled State Publications, 1899-1908 . Adelaide Hasse's Index of Economic Material in the Documents of the States of the United States, 1908-1919, continued the tradition, which was upheld in this century until recently by the Monthly Checklist of State Publications, 1910-1994, produced by the Library of Congress Exchange and Gift Division.
The discontinuation of this long-standing serial title, mainly due to production, distribution, and mailing costs, leaves a tremendous gap in access to state government information for both information professionals and users alike. For example, the 1993 listings included 21,375 monographs and periodical titles from the fifty states, territories and insular possessions of the U.S. Over the years coverage had been extended to include state blue books, legislative handbooks/guides, miscellaneous statistical sources, legislative journals, agency and subject reports, statistical abstracts, industrial/manufacturing directories, budget/financial documents, historic research guides, legislative research, telephone and education directories, and individual state checklists.
Although selective, specialized tools, such as the Statistical Reference Index (SRI) provide bibliographic access to a few of the major state reference sources, with the demise of the Monthly Checklist no comprehensive bibliography to publications of the fifty states now exists in either print or electronic format.
The StateList Project employs the World Wide Web to make the publishing activities of state governments known to a broad range of information professionals, Internet users, and library patrons, locally and globally. Our WWW site offers timely, centralized access to state checklists and/or shipping lists that are currently available on the Internet (a total of 32 states so far).
We are now in the midst of the next stage of our project: creating a test database that will allow us to determine the feasibility of developing an Internet-accessible database of all or most state checklists. The database will be searchable by keyword or by field (e.g. issuing agency, title, date, etc.)
This project, which grew from a proposal by Cheryl Rae Nyberg (formerly of the University of Illinois Law Library and now reference librarian at Gallagher Law Library, University of Washington), is a collaboration between librarians at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Colorado Law Library, and Kenyon College.
We will post further updates as progress is made. We welcome comments and suggestions.
Mary Mallory, Head, Documents Library, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
Rob Richards, Technical Services Librarian, Law Library,
University of Colorado
Priscilla McIntosh
Government Documents Library Home Page
Last updated August 8, 2001.