91´«Ã½

Counting California, a web-based system providing open access to economic and social data on California, has been chosen as the 2004 recipient of the LexisNexis/GODORT/91´«Ã½ "Documents to the People" Award. This award is a tribute to an individual, library, institution, or other non-commercial group that has most effectively encouraged the use of government documents in support of library service; Counting California, a project spearheaded by the California Digital Library, has most certainly succeeded in this regard.

Counting California is intended to integrate data from all levels of government in that it is a collection of disparate data from multiple agencies, integrated into a single collection and format that can be easily accessed by a variety of end users. Users are frequently unfamiliar with government agency organization; consequently, Counting California provides a subject-based approach to its organization. Researchers and the public can discover and interact with current and historical census data, almanac-style statistics, county business data, and a range of education, crime election, and demographic information from nearly a dozen different sources.

The communities served by Counting California are extremely diverse, including students, faculty and researchers, as well as all citizens - not only from the State of California - but across the entire country.

The success of Counting California in making it easy for users to get statistical information is just the beginning of the story, however. Counting California provides a production model for the future of government information in libraries, including:

• It is built with shared resources. Projects such as this are expensive to develop and maintain. Counting California drew upon the infrastructure of the shared resources of the California Digital Library and the talents of staff from several libraries.
• It is built to be scalable, with open standards. By using the Data Documentation Initiative metadata standard for social science data, an open and flexible format for describing numeric data, and by building a system that is flexible, Counting California is a model of a system that can be scaled to add new data easily and can migrate over time into new computing platforms and new software when that becomes necessary.
• It is a model of the role libraries have the potential to play in the digital world. Counting California shows that the traditional roles of libraries of selecting, acquiring, organizing, preserving, and providing access to information are as important in the digital world as they were in the analog.

To those requiring access to statistical data on California, Counting California has not only made life easier, but it is ensuring the preservation of usable electronic statistical data files for the future. It indeed effectively encourages the use of government documents in support of library service in a most unique and successful manner.