The Government Documents Interest Group, affectionately known as GoDIG, started in 1990. Our leader was Jim Walsh of the Boston College Documents Department. Since that time, we have requested that the BLC continue our group.

I’d like to share with you some of our activities and by doing so, emphasize our desire to continue as a Community of Interest.

GoDIG has held meetings to provide training for our members: training on products such as Mass CHIP (a database from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health). We co-sponsored with the New England Consortium of Law Libraries, web training on GPO ACCESS. At our meetings we discuss resources available to Documents Librarians; we share "war stories"; we give each other helpful hints on accessing materials off and on the web.

GoDIG has acted in an activist capacity to communicate with the Congress on issues relating to the Government Printing Office. Documents people are custodians of the public record. We advocated so that access to public records is preserved. We have sent letters to Congressional Committees when there was discussion of a transition to an electronic depository program. We expressed our concern that the authenticity and preservation of electronic documents was not being addressed. GoDIG, with our Regional Colleagues from GPLNE (Government Publications Librarians of New England), were a positive force in changing the Census Department’s policy regarding paper maps for the 1990 Census. We influenced our Congressmen and Senators AND the Census Bureau, itself, so that we all received paper maps of Massachusetts.

GoDIG has acted as a resource for upcoming events of interest to Documents Libraians; events such as meetings of the New England Map Organization; the State Data Center and Census workshops.

GoDIG produced a Directory of the BLC documents departments, in paper format, which was distributed to BLC libraries. We wanted all the BLC Libraries to advertise their documents collections.

GoDIG produced bookmarks which contained information/web site addresses of all the BLC documents departments in 1998. We have distributed one to each of you today.

GoDIG was the first BLC interest group to produce its own web page in 1996. Claire Loranz of Wellesley College was our webmaster and host. We are still hosted at Wellesley under the leadership of Betty Febo. (WE HAVE POSTERS FROM THE WEB PAGE WHICH BETTY FEBO AND MARK SCOTT, STATE LIBRARY WALKED AROUND WITH.)

GoDIG members were anxious and willing to help their colleagues at the Boston Public Library when the flood happened. Gail Fithian and her staff had our support in any way we could be of help.

GoDIG was pleased to present a First Tuesday program for the BLC.

GoDIG members visited individual Congressmen to demonstrate the web documents available to their local staff, both Federal and State databases.

GoDIG was responsible for initiating the development of a State Plan by our Federal Documents Depositories.

GoDIG members were involved in hosting a National Depository Council meeting in Rhode Island in 2000.

GoDIG has minutes of our meetings on our web page.

The GoDIG COI will hold its next meeting on February 8^th in the Library at Boston College.

Documents Librarians are a very special breed. We are passionate about our subject specialty. We love to network with each other. We share problems and successes with each other. We enjoy each other’s company.

We thank you for including us in today’s program and want you to know, from all of us, GoDIG librarians are here to serve you.

Bette L.Siegel