Citations in five leading environmental science journals were examined for accuracy. 24.41% of the 2,650 citations checked were found to contain errors. The largest category of errors was in the author field. Of the five journals Conservation Biology had the lowest percentage of citations with errors and Climatic Change had the highest. Of the citations with errors that could be checked in Web of Science, 18.18% of the errors caused a search for the cited article to fail. Citations containing electronic links had fewer errors than those without.

In order to explore the prevalence of federal government information on the World Wide Web, two random samples were taken of material sent to federal depository libraries in the first half of the year 2000. Over the course of eighteen months four separate attempts were made to find each of the sample publications on the World Wide Web using a variety of search engines. During the first attempt, one to five months after the material was sent to depository libraries, 47% of the publications in the sample were located on the Web. During the final and most successful attempt, 18 to 23 months after the distribution, 63% of the sample publications were located. Based on the sample, at present almost two-thirds of depository material are available on the Web approximately two years after the material was sent to depository libraries.

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I recently retired after more than four decades as a librarian. My job title always included “Government Documents” or “Government Information,” although, as I am sure you understand, a large share of my time was dedicated to what is covered by that familiar phrase “other duties as assigned.”But having turned in my keys and name tag gave me a chance to ponder the high (and low) lights of my career. Here are a few of the more memorable moments related to the govdoc biz.