2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

154
BEST PRACTICES 2012
Around the same time that the post 1933 Attorneys General Speeches were
completed and being added to the DOJ internet site, the Library Staff Director,
Dennis G. Feldt, was contacted by the DOJ Office of Public Affairs (PAO) and asked
to consider adding to the collection by locating any Attorneys General Speeches
prior to 1933. Attorney General Eric Holder was very interested in completing the
entire collection of speeches. As a result, the PAO sent a summer intern to the
Library of Congress to investigate what was within their manuscripts collection, and
he created a standardized template to document his findings. PAO then met with
the DOJ Library Staff and the DOJ Office of Records Management and Policy (ORMP)
to discuss the expansion of the Attorneys’ General Speeches Project in order to
continue adding to the DOJ Open Government effort. ORMP noted that the Federal
Records Act was not passed until 1950, and therefore, federal government officials’
records were not retained by the government prior to that time. Any pre-1933
Speeches or Attorneys’ General papers might not exist or could prove very difficult
to locate.
Unwilling to be deterred, however, several DOJ reference librarians and a library
technician (Amanda Abramowitz (intern), Layne Bosserman, Maria Evans, Robin
Foltz, Janice Fridie, Jim Higgins, Jennifer McMahan, Melanie Michaelson, Lynn
Mikulsky, Jan Oberla and Kera Winburn) divided searching duties, looking for the
Attorneys’ General papers from the very first Attorney General, Edmund Jennings
Randolph (1789), to Attorney General William Dewitt Mitchell (1933), trying to
document the possible locations of any potential personal papers or manuscripts
collections.
The reference librarians combed through databases such as Gale, ProQuest
Congressional, ProQuest, Ebscohost, Lexis and Westlaw, searching for articles that
contained biographical information as well as citations to primary sources; searched
WorldCat to determine what other libraries had in their collection; scoped out
historical societies, universities and the National Archives and Records
Administration’s collections as well through the Internet. In the end, several of the
DOJ Library reference staff, compiled a comprehensive finding aid for each pre-
1933 Attorney General which outlined their biographical information and the
possible location(s) of their papers. Since the Library of Congress houses many
papers of former Attorneys General, we have involved them from the beginning,
and are currently locating and digitizing any Attorneys General papers from their
Manuscripts Division collections. This project is ongoing and, with the assistance of
a library intern, Rose Strickman, additional documents will be digitized and added
to the DOJ Internet as they are found.