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.