Information Center
at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies

In support of continuing research projects, the Andrew Young School information center provides to the college faculty and researchers some 1,500 volumes, with about 40 current subscriptions to newsletters, working papers, journals, yearbooks and directories in economics and fiscal policy. Many items are gifts from faculty. In the past year about 1,200 publications and conference announcements were circulated to faculty and graduate research assistants, with about 10 percent of the items kept in-house. The information center's role is to collect, catalog and distribute relevant literature and electronic resources, and to work with university libraries to help interpret the ever changing information products to faculty and their research assistants.

The information center's catalog of resources on DBTextworks lists over 3,000 records of subscriptions, government documents, books, CDs and data sets for AYSPS researchers. This catalog is soon to be accessible via Internet connection through the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies site, with journal holdings and data sets listed. Gardner Neely manages the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies Library/Information Center.

This year, new data and literature CDs and datasets added include the following:

• World Bank Africa Database 2002,
• UNIDO Industrial Statistics Database (3-Digit Level of ISIC Code 1963-1999)
• IMF International Financial Statistics
• Global Development Finance from World Bank
• Russian Regions 2000: Goskomstat of the Russian Federation
• European Tax Handbook of International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation
• Corporate Tax, a Worldwide Summary/PriceWaterhouseCoopers
• State Tax OneDisc/Tax Analysts
• The 2001 Georgia County Guide CD from the University of Georgia
• Regional Economic Information System from the Bureau of Economic Analysis
• Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Review from the American Economic Association
• 1997 Census of Governments from U.S. Census - Web access
• OECD Revenue Statistics available from SourceOECD and Ingenta
• State and Local Taxation: 2001 CD by Oldman & Pomp
• Tax Analysts: Federal Research Library and State Tax CDs 2002
• National Bureau of Economic Research Working Papers

Online sources from the University System of Georgia's Galileo service and GSU funded research databases provide access to electronic journals through the Pullen Library's Web site. A timesaving feature on this site is Electronic Journal Locator that has an indexed list of on-campus accessible journals that has many titles one can click directly into the fulltext article, if contracted by Pullen Library or Galileo. Abstracts and full text from such titles as Journal of Applied Econometrics, and Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, are downloadable for those that register from an on-campus computer.

The Information Center has coordinated with the Pullen Library liaison in policy studies, LaLoria Konata, to gain access to relevant literature via selected web subscriptions. PolicyFile, a web-based abstracting service, covers a wide range of public policy research that draws its content from policy think tanks, university research programs, and research organizations. Electronic journals are available from faculty offices and student computer labs. Among these is Jstor for back issues from differing publishers. For example, the publishers, Oxford University Press, Wiley InterScience, are available campus-wide. Web of Science, from ISI's Social Science Citation Index, allows users to track the citing process of academic papers. From Oxford University Press, users can print articles from such periodicals as Journal of African Economies, Economic Inquiry, Oxford Economic Papers, and the Journal of International Economic Law.

On Galileo, users have access to highly specialized academic literature through ProQuest, and Ebsco. Both of these now allow users to e-mail articles found through their search engines. Lexis-Nexus has added statistical search engine, which allows searching of abstracts and table names of governmental data sources.

On Galileo selected databases, such as OCLC FirstSearch, have added the export feature, allowing the user to e-mail plain text or HTML records to a Web e-mail address, or to export citations and abstracts to a bibligraphic manager, such as EndNote.

Galileo now has character settings for non-English text, including Spanish, French, and several Asian languages, thus making the University System of Georgia database interface truly accessible to international scholarship. Georgia archives are being added on the menu of Galileo's interface to serve scholars in search of state history sources including the Civil War and civil rights history in Georgia.

Major literature services added are Dow Jones Interactive, and Reuters, soon to be renamed Factiva, as well as Ingenta. All of these have very large libraries of full text journals and abstracts in most academic disciplines. Ingenta absorbed the Carl Uncover service to faculty, providing both document delivery of a large catalog of journal articles on demand, as well as table of contents service e-mailed to faculty by their selection of journals.

Rather than attempting to store all the ever-growing professional literature, the Information Center is posting Web site links or other locations where source materials can be found. The Web site features international tax literature links, pertinent publishers, suppliers and data centers, and links to Pullen library's new menu.

The university online catalog, called GIL, (Galileo Interconnected Libraries), allows users to search the university catalog, to search by format, to indicate the status of a checked-out book, and to renew it, find a stored journal; and to send e-mails with citations via Web-based e-mail. These improvements have proven very successful with our traveling faculty on assignment oversees in developing countries and elsewhere.

We provide orientation to economics and social science literature sources available at the information center and the university libraries. Services to masters students from Indonesia are provided in coordination with LaLoria Konata at Pullen Library.