Present: Sue Anderson (Eastern Washington University), Robin Clausen (Pierce County Library System), Carlos Diaz (The Evergreen State College), Jean Hartman (Spokane Public Library), Herrick Heitman (Washington State Library), Jan Jorgensen (Central Washington University), Justin Otto (Eastern Washington University), Judy Solomon (Seattle Public Library), and Marilyn Von Seggern (Washington State University).

The spring meeting of the Northwest Government Information Network was held on Friday, May 1, 2009 on the campus of Central Washington University.

Registration and Refereshments Registration and refreshments were provided from 9:00 a.m. to 9:25 a.m. in the Dean's Conference Room. The group immediately adjourned to the library's computer room for the morning program hosted by Linda Clark, Information Services Specialist, U. S. Census Bureau, Seattle Regional Office. This training session was also attended by several other campus staff and students. The strategy for the 2010 census is 'count everyone, count them once, and count them in the right place.' In addition, as always and as a reminder to all, they will be ensuring the confidentiality of the information gathered as they only publish summary data. By law, the Census Bureau does not share personal information with anyone including other federal or law enforcement agencies.

Census 2010 The seven topics on the 2010 census form include name, age, gender, race, ethnicity, relationship and rent/own house. It will take the average household only ten minutes to complete. Currently, their agents in the Seattle, Spokane and Tacoma local offices are address canvassing by checking all addresses out in the field and capturing GPS coordinates. The agency will be recruiting for and hiring 4,000 individuals in 2009. Questionnaires are scheduled to be delivered in May 2010 including bilingual questionnaires in Spanish and English. They expect a 64% return rate on the mail questionnaire. The non-response follow-up is the most costly component of the census as the enumerators, including multilingual enumerators, will visit 47 million addresses and make multiple attempts to contact households that did not respond to the mail questionnaire.

In 2000, the Census used two questionnaires, a short form ('the counts') that asked for basic demographic and housing information such as age, sex, race, how many people lived in the housing unit and if the housing unit was owned or rented by the resident; and, a long form ('the characteristics') that collected the same information as the short form but also requested more in-depth information such as income, education and language spoken at home. Approximately one in six households nationwide received the long form.

In 2010, the Census will focus on 'the counts' as all addresses will receive the short form. The American Community Survey will collect 'the characteristics' information as 3 million addresses will receive the ACS survey in addition to the 2010 Census form. The ACS data will be continuously collected throughout the year either through mail, telephone or personal visit. Some of the key differences between the two surveys include income where the decennial census income data refers to the previous calendar year while the ACS survey asks for income for the previous twelve months. In addition, school enrollment is addressed differently as the decennial census asks if a person attended school 'any time since February 1' while the ACS asks if a person attended school during 'the last three months.' The ACS goal is to produce estimates comparable to the Census 2000 long form as the estimates will cover the same small areas (down to the block group level) but with smaller sample sizes. The caveat is that smaller sample sizes equal reductions in reliability in estimates.

Linda Clark also provided an overview of the 2007 Economic Census. New for 2007 is a change in publication formats, changes to small geographic area definitions, non-employers (businesses with no paid employees who make up almost three-fourths of all US businesses but less that five percent of business receipts or revenues) to be included with employer (businesses with one or more paid employees) data, revised industry classification system, new and changing industries, product classification expands to all service sectors (NAICS Product Codes cover the mining and manufacturing sectors only, Product Line Codes cover all sectors except mining, manufacturing and construction, and Kinds of Business & Types of Construction Codes cover the construction sector only), new data on pension and other fringe benefits, data on franchising form more industries, more data in Survey of Business Owners reports, business e xpenses data moved to other services, and Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas boundary changes. As a reminder, economic data is collected from businesses and demographic data is collected from people and households.

Changes for 2007 Economic Census include: discontinue release of pdfs and pre-printed reports, discontinue Econo02 DVD-ROMs product, limited html tables, American FactFinder the only release mechanism, and, decrease time it takes to distribute the data on American FactFinder after analysts approve it. The American FactFinder economic release formats will include facts sheets (selected data for all sectors presented in a table), quick reports (selected data for an industry, geography or products presented in a table), thematic maps (selected data including ratios presented in a map) and detailed datasets. Linda Clark provided sample exercises for actual hands-on use of the Census web site. In addition, she strongly encouraged anyone with questions or wanting additional information to contact her directly. Her email address is linda.clark@census.gov ; direct telephone number is 425-908-3062; and cell phone number is 206-446-8794.

Lunch Lunch was held in the student union building and was immediately followed by a tour of the Brooks Library conducted by Jan Jorgensen. On the first floor of Brooks Library is the reference collection, reserve books and circulation desk. The second floor houses newspapers, magazine and journals. The book stacks are located on both the third and fourth floors. The documents department is available on the third floor along with a large room dedicated to maps. The group spent time with Linda Baker, Federal Documents Specialist, who works directly with the collection's cataloging. A music library, special collections and archives, children's collection, and quiet study area share space on the fourth floor. Due to reductions in funding, the CWU special collections and archives area is open only by appointment.

NGIN Business Meeting:

The business meeting was called to order at 1:55 p.m. Copies of the minutes of the spring meeting were distributed. Carlos moved to accept the minutes. The motion was seconded by Marilyn and passed. The treasurer's report was presented. As of 4/30/09, the balance was $751.44. Expenses during the last six months include a thirty-dollar meal reimbursement for the OLA/WLA speaker and $125 to Mary Clare Beck (UW) in October 2008. A reminder was given to all to pay their membership dues. Robin moved and Marilyn seconded the motion to accept the treasurer's report as presented. The motion passed.

Participation and New Members Carlos reported mixed results on the membership survey for increasing participation in NGIN. Only nine of thirty members responded and, of those, most were willing to participate in teleconferencing but not willing to host. A discussion followed regarding the best way to reach out to more individuals and to get maximum participation. Several ideas were mentioned such as using OPAL, webcasts, etc. Judy volunteered to investigate podcasts and report back to the group. Justin will find out what it costs to use OPAL and Herrick will look into funding at the state level as a direct tie-in to regional depository status. Other topics to promote NGIN were discussed such as providing information to library school students, recognizing or honoring long-time librarians in the documents field, NGIN listserv, encouraging new students to get involved in the depository community, providing scholarships to local students, etc. It was also suggested that a congratulations greeting card be sent to all retiring documents librarians from NGIN. Sue recommended that Carlos develop a proposal and send it out to the entire NGIN membership for consideration.

Carlos moved and Jan seconded a motion to offer all University of Washington I-School students or any other area resident that is enrolled in a distance library school program, a no-fee one-year membership in NGIN. Each year these no-fee memberships will expire and all individuals will be expunged from the membership list. However, as long as the individual is still enrolled in a library school program, he or she will be eligible for another no-fee, one-year membership in NGIN. The motion passed. Carlos will be developing an email to submit to the UW I-School each fall providing information about NGIN and this new membership opportunity and asking that they forward it to each of their students.

NGIN Participation in WLA No program participation from NGIN will be held at the join 2010 WLA/PNLA Conference in Victoria or at the 2010 PLA Conference in Portland. We did not have enough funds or enough preparation time. However, all members were encouraged to come to the fall meeting ready to discuss programming ideas for WLA 2011 as the proposals will need to be completely ready for submission to WLA by the spring 2010 meeting.

DLC Report Justin Otto reported on the December Federal Depository Meeting in Tampa, Florida. There are concerns from the library directors of the large regional academic depositories that Title 44 is out-of-date, creates problems for them, and is inapplicable in today's libraries and electronic world. Most of their large collections are uncataloged and unused and, like everyone else, all are looking at sizable budget reductions. Justin commented that if these statements are concerns for regional depositories they are also concerns for all of us. In the current situation, there are problems with Title 44, all institutions must either solve the problems themselves or walk away from participation and individuals are choosing to walk away. One of the primary recommendations from this meeting was that GPO hire an outside consultant with no inside interests to look at the current depository system including all of the stakeholders and to present options that would create a more flexible system. Everything needs to be up for consideration and discussion. FDSys designed as a big data gathering and capturing system to keep GPO viable is now up and running. This live system has a robust backup but most librarians in attendance still preferred the LOCKSS concept. GPO, through their recent RFP for a digitization partner, has reached an agreement with an entity but was unable to publically release the information at this meeting. The working concept is that this entity would digitize the materials using NARA-approved standards, provide the digitization to GPO who would enter the copy into the FDSys database and retain their own copy of the digitized product. He further commented that the further information including the name of the new partner should be released within the next few weeks.

New President-Elect The vacant position of Program Chair/President election was up for consideration. Marilyn Von Seggern volunteered to assume the position. Robin then nominated Marilyn to fill the position and Sue seconded the motion. The motion passed. Thank you, Marilyn, for volunteering!

Appreciation to CWU A big thank you and round of applause was extended to Jan Jorgensen and Central Washington University for hosting this meeting.

The meeting adjourned at 3:40 p.m.

Next meeting:
The fall 2009 meeting will be held at the University of Washington Law Library as Peggy Jarrett agreed to host the event.

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