Hi Harriett6655,
In point of law, materials written by government employees _in the
context of their employment_ are automatically part of the public
domain. This means that the thousands of government reports and other
documents that come out every year are in the public domain, but the
short stories or other writings by government employees in their
"spare time" are not (this is a touchy subject among some of us
"G-men" and "G-women"!).
Below I'm giving you several avenues of finding government reports on
a variety of subjects. Many of them are available online in PDF
format, and others are available in Rich Text Format (.rtf) and MS
Word (.doc).
Since you mentioned the State Department, I want to make a special
mention of their work. The State Department does not, in general,
release its reports on the Internet, for reasons of national security.
If you are interested in the Country Studies/Area Reports that are
kept online by the Library of Congress and produced by the Department
of the Army, try this link: http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html.
I think these are really fascinating reports about many foreign
countries - they include chapters on the politics, geography and
society, economics, and national security interests of approximately
100 current and former countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq,
Somalia, and Vietnam.
The Government Printing Office maintains databases and indexes of
online and print reports that go through it. That site is:
http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/index.html. In addition, GPO Access
keeps a list of newly published electronic titles, arranged by month
of publication, at: http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/locators/net/index.html.
These tend to range over a wide variety of government agencies.
In addition, several agencies are linked into GPO Access. I'm listing
them out individually below:
Department of Energy "Information Bridge"
http://www.osti.gov/bridge/
"The Information Bridge provides the open source to full-text and
bibliographic records of Department of Energy (DOE) research and
development reports in physics, chemistry, materials, biology,
environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer and
information science, renewable energy, and other topics."
GrayLit Network
http://www.osti.gov/graylit/
"The GrayLIT Network makes the gray literature of U.S. Federal
Agencies easily accessible over the Internet. It taps into the search
engines of distributed gray literature collections, enabling the user
to find information without first having to know the sponsoring
agency." - For DOE, EPA, NASA, DOD.
NASA Technical Reports Server
http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/NTRS
"The NASA Technical Report Server is an experimental service that
allows users to search the many different abstract and technical
report servers maintained by various NASA centers and programs."
Some agencies, such as the EPA, print their own documents. You can
often find these through the National Technical Information Service,
or NTIS, which is technically run by the Department of Commerce:
http://www.ntis.gov/. The thing about NTIS is that you often have to
pay for publications from them, and they tend to sell print, rather
than online, copies of things.
If you would like to keep looking, the link listed by pafalafa-ga is a
decent one, though it tends to ignore whole agencies (the indexing of
the EPA is particularly poor). I often go to the help pages at the
University of Michigan Documents Center
(http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/federal.html) or the University of
Virginia Library Government Document Resources
(http://www.lib.virginia.edu/govdocs/mstrndx.html).
I found the above websites largely because I already knew where to
look, having worked as a contractor for the Environmental Protection
Agency's library near me. I also did a DMOZ search for "federal
government documents" (www.dmoz.org).
Good luck with your text! I think this is a great idea, and hope you
will find some quality information for your project. Please don't
hesitate to contact us again in the future!
librariankt |
