I spent most of last week in Washington, D.C. attending the Interagency Depository Seminar. Those of you unfamiliar with government documents are no doubt staring blankly, so I’ll explain. The Interagency Depository Seminar is a 5-day seminar during which people from federal agencies (hence the “interagency”) come to speak to government documents librarians about the sorts of information published or produced by that agency. The Government Printing Office organizes this seminar.1
In keeping with my own rules, I’ll tell you why I hoped to attend this conference. I am rather new to government documents – I came into this role about one year ago. My main reason for attending this seminar is because my predecessor suggested that I would get a lot out of attending. I did – I learned a lot about government documents, and had some good opportunities to network with other government documents librarians.
Now, I don’t generally enjoy reading about conferences on other people’s blogs, because their entries most often take the form of notes, which I find difficult to comprehend with more context. So, in an effort to make my notes more enjoyable or useful to those few of you that are reading, I’ve decided to split my notes into three categories: the good, the bad, and the useful.
1 The word “depository” refers to Federal Depository Libraries. There’s a good explanation of Federal Depository Libraries here.