APRIL 2017 22 STATE LEGISLATURES
WHAT STAFF KNOW
Megan McClure is NCSL’s liaison to the
Legislative Research Librarians Staff Section.
“The only thing that
you absolutely have to
know is the location of
the library.”
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
BY MEGAN MCCLURE
Legislative librarians are a studious and feisty group of guides who love a good laugh just as much as a clever legisla-tive research question. Client-driven
and guided by statehouse timelines, legislative librarians are a key element of the lawmaking process.
They provide state legislators, legislative and state agency staff, as well as the general public, with critical, confidential and nonpar-tisan information and resources.
Like state legislatures themselves, libraries vary in their structures, resources and services and may be housed in the executive or legis-lative branch. Some have large staffs, while others get by with just one full-time librarian and one library assistant.
Here’s what librarians want you to know about their role in the work of the legislature.
[1\We’ve got answers based
on the facts.
Librarians love serving their legislatures with the timely, thorough and reliable research neces-sary for knowledgeable and effective legislation.
They know that not everything is on the inter-net, and not everything on the internet is true.
Most legislative libraries contain a con-siderable amount of information, regardless of their size. Among the many resources are
legislative studies, committee minutes, super-seded statutes, historical budget materials, statistical resources and a plethora of more traditional online-subscription resources such as Lexis, Westlaw and HeinOnline, not to mention house and senate journals, session laws and bill drafts.
Most legislative and state libraries also have large archival collections containing not only statutes, legislation and committee reports, but also state government documents and documents of historical importance.
Colorado, for example, has state and regionally specific databases. One of them, the Colorado General Assembly–Statutory Reports database, allows the public to access reports the General Assembly requires exec-utive agencies to submit. Another, the Colo-rado Legislators Past and Present database, contains a profile of every member who has served in the General Assembly.
[2\We are the Watson to
your Sherlock.
We can help with almost anything. Just try us. Want to know what the media are saying about the topic of your bill? We can do that. Want fact-checking that’s based on informa-tion from recognized reference sources? We can do that, too.
3 Things Legislative Research Librarians Want You to Know
STATE LEGISLATURES 23 APRIL 2017
WHAT STAFF KNOW
Maryland’s librarians, for example, can index bills, create bill synopses, and clip and collect newspaper articles, as can librarians in Kansas and Montana. Maryland also live-streams bill hearings in committee and provides a link on the Maryland General Assembly website for watching the committee hearing for any given bill. Previously, website users had to sift through hours of hearings to find the legislation they were interested in.
Most state legislative libraries play an important role in keeping thorough and real-time documentation of legislative action. Librarians and researchers often staff information desks with extended hours during sessions.
During legislative sessions in Texas, several staff from the Legislative Ref-erence Library enter bill actions as they occur on the floors of the House and Sen-ate into the capitol-wide legislative infor-mation system. It feeds information to the public Texas Legislature Online website and a toll-free bill status hotline.
Many other legislative libraries operate legislative hotlines to answer questions about the status of bills or legislative procedures. The State Library of Kan-sas does, and has also recently added an instant message chat option to its website for quick answers to questions about the current legislative session.
In Alaska and Montana, the library staff offer legislator and staff trainings and will give individualized lessons on how to perform good historical legislative research.
Some librarians, like those at the Poynter Legislative Research Library in Louisiana, even provide document format changes, bibliographic and citation checks, and the compilation of talking points.
Check with your state legislative library to find out what services it provides.
[3\We’ve got connections.Legislative library staff are always busy
providing specialized institutional knowl-edge and research contacts. With small budgets, most legislative library staff have become adept at tapping outside resources
and creating cross-institutional relation-ships with local universities, state libraries and library professional staff associations such as NCSL’s Legislative Research Librarian Staff Section.
Legislative librarians are apt at finding and cultivating strong contacts, not only within agencies, state government and libraries, but also on a national level. The Missouri library staff often say, “If we don’t know the answer, we know someone who does.”
Many librarians are aware of their library’s limitations due to advances in technology and budget issues, but they know how to make the system work within these limitations. The majority of legis-lative librarians hold, at least, a master’s degree in library science. These librarians have the training and experience to know how to find the information needed, with-out wasting time doing it. And you can rest assured that the research done and queries you make are confidential and protected. In North Carolina, as well as the majority of other states, legislative library staff adhere to the same statutory legislative confidentiality requirement that applies to all legislative staff.
“The library’s resources are older than legislators, staff and lobbyists,” Frances Thomas, from the Poynter library, likes to point out. “If you need to check the institutional memory of the Legislature, contact us.”
Einstein was right: Get to know your legislative library. Once discovered, it
will become an indispensable source for all well-informed legislators and staffers. With a legislative research librarian’s help, working in or for the legislature will be much easier than mastering Einstein’s the-ory of relativity.
What Is the Legislative Research Librarian Staff
Section?
This staff section, known as LRL,
is NCSL’s professional development
organization dedicated to the nation’s
legislative research library staff. The
group provides a forum for discussing
research and library services, seeking
ways to improve operations and
procedures for legislative libraries, and
improving the professional development
of legislative librarians. The group
sponsors programs at NCSL’s Legislative
Summit, awards the annual Notable
Document Awards, holds annual
professional development seminars
for legislative librarians, and regularly
presents webinars on professional skills
development. For more information, visit
ncsl.org.
This ongoing series is dedicated to the little
known and sometimes misunderstood
work performed by the more than 30,000
legislative staff employees in state capitals
across the country.