There are a few good places to start your search for government information. The government itself runs FedWorld, at http://www.fedworld.gov. This resource is sorted by category, so you can look up Health Care, for example, and be directed to nine different home pages, including the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease. Another good source is the Federal Web Locator at the Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy, at http://www.law.vill.edu:80/Fed-Agency/. The Federal Web Locator is organized by agency rather than subject matter, so you have to have a general idea of where the information is kept before you can access it.
The University of Michigan Documents Center, at http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Documents.center/, has a useful guide for finding government documents. Although it does contain pointers to online resources, its strength is in cataloging the holdings of this typical government repository. We hope that the San Antonio Library will post a similar guide when they come online later this year. For now, if you need to do in-depth research in government documents and don't feel like trotting over to Ann Arbor, print out a copy of the Michigan guide and take it with you to our own library. Michigan also maintains a Clearinghouse of Subject-Oriented Guides, at http://www.lib.umich.edu/chouse/tree/govlaw.html. These are text documents -- 27 of them in the government and law category alone -- that point you to Internet resources in a multitude of areas. I found most of the guides to be ancient, circa 1994. Because many were written in the Paleolithic, pre-WWW era of the Internet, many of the URLs are dead or dying. Still, the subject-oriented guides can provide some research clues if you are researching a tetchy topic.
The Government Information Locator Service (GILS), at http://info.er.usgs.gov/gils/index.html, is experiment but promises to simplify your search for government information. GILS will be a cross-agency searchable index. Type in your search criteria, and GILS will someday take you to all the sources. But not yet. Keep your eye on this one but don't hold your breath. The homepage hasn't been updated in more than two months, which is not a good sign.
If you're looking for Texas Government Information, the best jump station is at http://info.texas.gov/tih.html. A useful pointer here is to the Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas at Austin, http://www.law.utexas.edu/library/netref/texas.html. Here you can get Word Perfect versions of State bills and resolutions as well as Windows help files containing the rules of civil and criminal evidence.
Last month was an important one in the world of online access to government documents The Paperwork Reduction Act took effect on October 1st. Among the key provisions of the act, part of the Contract With America, is that the public must get access to government databases in a "timely and equitable manner." On September 28, the Security and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database came online after a two-year trial. Immediately, lobbyists attacked the project, saying it threatened the retail information industry. My opinion is that the benevolent government will win against the greedy forces of big business. If you want to see what the fuss is about, go to EDGAR ar http://www.sec.gov/. This is a valuable resource for those doing financial research. I tested it out by typing in Netscape, as my favorite Web browser just went public with much fanfare. To my amusement, I received a return message saying that Netscape did not file an electronic return. Concerned about security on the Internet, maybe? If you do want to see what an entry looks like, type in KODAK. I got a ton of responses for that company.
Another slick database is Thomas, the legislative database maintained by the Library of Congress. Reach it at http://thomas.loc.gov. Thomas is a searchable full-text index. Type in San Antonio + base closure, and you'll get a list of everything relating to Kelly Air Force Base.
A relatively new page is GulfLink, the Persian Gulf War Illness Home Page, at http://www.dtic.mil/gulflink. This page contains background information, research reports and analysis of the issues related to the illnesses affecting Persian Gulf War Veterans. As a Gulf War veteran myself, I intend to keep this one in my bookmark file. Another veteran-related site is the Library of Congress's Vietnam Era Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Database. This database, which contains more than 100,000 records, is a catalog of all of the records held on Vietnam Era POW/MIAs. It is not full text, but microfilmed copies of the original material can be sent to you local library on loan, for free. Find it at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pow/powhome.html.
A neat resource that more and more government sites are making
available is downloadable forms. You can get the most popular tax forms
in Adobe's PDF format straight from the IRS, at http://www.ustreas.gov/treasury/bureaus/irs/taxforms.html.
If you attended the last Alamo-PC general meeting, Adobe handed out a CD-ROM
that contained its Acrobat reader needed to print documents in the Portable
Document Format. If you missed it, you can download the free program from
the IRS site or any other page that carries PDF documents. Another site
that carries popular forms is Social Security Online, at http://www.ustreas.gov/treasury/bureaus/irs/taxforms.html.
This site also carries the quadrennial report on the financial status of
the SSA trust funds, A report n trends and issues in retirement savings,
The latest COLA increase, a quick reference guide for employers, a hypertext
copy of the Social Security handbook, a program to calculate your own retirement
benefits. The list goes on. Want to take bets on whether this site will
still be active in twenty some years when I'm eligible for Social Security?
Didn't think so!
New to San Antonio and don't know who your congressman is? Go to The Zipper, at http://www.stardot.com/~lukeseem/zip.html. On the simple form, type in a zip code and the site will return the name of your congressman, his address and phone number and an e-mail address, if he has one. Don't hold your breath on e-mail addresses: I went through my entire address book and got all the way to Ross until I found a cousin in New Jersey who lived in a congressional district with an online congressman. If you're an activist, you might want a database of all the congressional addresses to use in mass mailings. To find one, go to http://www.servtech.com/public/maxlent.
Once you've unearthed the name of your congressman it's time to find out more about him. The best place to look is The Vote Smart Web, whose motto is, It's time to look in on the hired help. Reach it at http://www.vote-smart.org/ Flicking through the easy-to-use interface, I got to my congressman, Henry B. Gonzalez. I was presented with his biography, a list of his campaign contributors, his voting record and a chart showing how various interest groups evaluated his voting record. The AFL-CIO likes Mr. Gonzalez; the NRA doesn't.
There is also a wealth of partisan information on the Internet. Those of you who consider yourselves conservatives have probably discovered Town Hall, at http://www.townhall.com. This is an award-winning site, that has a lot of attractive interactive features. It carries the work of many conservative columnists, including William F. Buckley, Pete DuPont and Phyllis Schlafly, plus clippings from the Washington Times and the National Review. I haven't found a liberal site that's nearly as elegant as town hall, but you might get a kick out of NewtWatch, where you can get everything from a report on the Speaker's staff salaries to a review of his new novel, 1945. Visit it at http://www.cais.com/newtwatch.
Political junkies will want to go to the Political Site of the
Day. This is a non-partisan site that selects political sites that it finds
entertaining, informative and relevant. They maintain an archive of past
sites. Two good addresses to slide into your bookmark file are Campaign
'96, at http://politicsusa.com/PoliticsUSA/campaign96/
and Time Magazine Campaign '96, at http://www.pathfinder.com/@@MUGX9EE*gwMAQNZB/pathfinder/politics/index.html.
Both contain numerous pointers to presidential wannabes.