Two of my classmates, Howard Kovensky and Chris Pickford, opted to design Web sites as their final project in our Government Documents class. Our teacher, Sheri Irvin, gave us three options: do a 2-person team 30- to 60-minute instruction session and write a small team paper; write a 15-page research paper; or create a Web site focusing on government documents.
Howard Kovensky created a resource Web site for women: Online Government Resources for Women. Since the focus of this class is government documents, most of the links go to government agency and department Web pages. He has created sections for health, history, legal, missing information, statistics, and women in government. “Women in Government” has links to many of the Web sites for women in the U.S. Senate. All the links are clearly annotated. He offers personal opinion—“One caveat, though. Although the intent of this website is to provide government resources, please remember that you can only trust the information as much as you trust your government. With this in mind, a section called Missing Information will include some resources from outside of the government to help you evaluate the information you read and understand why some information may be unavailable.”
Chris Pickford contributed Designing effective government information Web portals for libraries to the Merlot database. The Web site covers design basics (elements, essentials, copyright, accessibility), gathering resources (the best links for tracking down government information, which includes government Web sites, listservs, Weblogs, e-newsletters, etc.), how to organize the information, and further reading. There is a lot here. Much of it is applicable to designing any focused Web site. In the “Design Basics” section, Chris explains that you need to write out what you want your Web site to provide (a mission statement for your Web site) and you need to understand the patron base that will be using your Web site and to create one or more patron group profiles. I have barely started looking through all the links. A lot of time and thought went into this resource; I hope it stays around and is maintained and updated.
I opted to do a paper on Government Web sites designed for Children. There are some useful and informative U.S. federal government Web sites for children, and there some poorly designed and not age-appropriate Web sites. I won’t go into it here, as I expect to do something more with my findings later. The main portals for U.S. government Web sites are Ben’s Guide to U.S. Government for Kids and FirstGov for Kids. I also think that the following are good Web sites for finding goverment Web sites for kids, though there is considerable overlap of links among these and the portals: FedStats: Federal Government Kids’ Page, Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE), and Michael Cupano’s (8th district Masschusetts) list of age-level annotated List of U.S. government web sites for students, parents and educators. Only a few members of congress have Web site areas addressing kids.
