Mississippi State University students have a wonderful educational, and at times, recreational resource in the form of the Mitchell Memorial Library. But do the students truly know just how useful this resource can be? The government documents area in the library is home to a plethora of crucial and informative documents, which are often hard to locate. These include tax forms, census material, and topographic maps, as well as various other federal materials. Some of the materials can be checked-out; others must be copied. Either way, they can be an invaluable resource.
MSU owes much of its government document collection to the Federal Depository Library Program. Established by Congress FDLP in 1813 to ensure public access to government information.
The Mitchell Memorial Library is a 95 percent selective depository, which means the library receives 95 percent of the materials available from the FDLP. The library must meet certain standards, including availability of the government document materials to all people, not just students, to remain part of the FDLP.
The FDLP materials remain government property, though available in the MSU library.
MSU has been a federal depository since 1907 when the university was still Mississippi A&M.
LaDonne Delgado, the coordinator of government documents and microforms department of the library, began working in the government documents area nine years ago.
She said at that time the library was a 55-60 percent selective depository. Since then, the amount of government material available in the library has increased dramatically for several reasons, including increased funding and space.
The ways students can locate and access the information have changed as well.
“Prior to 1997, government documents were not in the online catalog,” Delgado said. “We started in 1997 purchasing records, which could be downloaded onto the catalog. This means that any document received after 1997 will be in the catalog, and we are working diligently to get our materials prior to that date in the catalog.”
As of August, the Mitchell Memorial Library is the first Mississippi library to be included as a United Nations repository, which means students and the general public will soon have access to international documents such as official United Nations records, periodicals, and the United Nations Treaty Series.
The massive amounts of information to be found in the government documents area can be used in several ways.
Lee Lassner, an MSU graduate, uses both the government documents and the microforms collection for historical research for books.
“It’s helped enormously,” he said. “One can use not only the copiers, but also the microfiche printers.”
“Sometimes, in writing papers, it’s necessary to use certain facts and statistics that only the government keeps,” Wilson Boyd, a sophomore in liberal arts, said.