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 researcher some 1,500 volumes, with about 35 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 1,600 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. Gardner Neely manages the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies Library/Information Center.

The information center's catalog of resources on DBTextworks lists almost 3,000 records of subscriptions, government documents, books, CDs and data sets for AYSPS researchers. This catalog is accessible from any faculty office in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, with journal holdings and CDs listed on the website. This year, new data and literature CDs and datasets added include the following:

• World Bank Africa Database 2000,
• OECD Main Economic Indicators Historical Edition 1960-1998
• IMF International Financial Statistics
• Global Development Finance from World Bank
• European Tax Handbook 2000 of International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation
• Corporate Tax 2000 a Worldwide Summary / PriceWaterhouseCoopers
• State Tax OneDisc/ Tax Analysts
• County Business Patterns CD 1997 University of Georgia
• Statistical Abstract of the United States 2000 - web access
• Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Review
• 1997 Census of Governments - web access
• OECD Revenue Statistics available now from SourceOECD and Ingenta

Domestic data sources acquired include a new campus-wide access to STAT-USA through the Pullen Library, new CDs from the U.S. Census: County and City Databook, Counties USA, and a statistics CD from the ICMA.

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 website. A new timesaving feature on this site is Electronic Journal Locator that has an indexed list of oncampus accessible journals that has many titles you can click directly into the fulltext article, if contracted for 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 liason 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 it's 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 Jstore for back issues from differing publishers. For example, the publishers, Oxford University Press, Wiley InterScience, and the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Papers, are now 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.

Now 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 Universe, which allows searching of abstracts and table names of governmental data sources. 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 moving toward posting website links or other locations where source materials can be found. The website features international tax literature links, pertinent publishers, suppliers and data centers. Pullen library upgraded from OLLI, the old telnet catalog, to a web product called GIL to post their catalog. GIL allows users to renew books online, to search by format, to indicate the status of a checked-out book or stored journal; and to send e-mails with citations.

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 is provided in coordination with LaLoria Konata at Pullen Library.

Currently our new student assistant, Serhiy Kostyuk is a Muskie Fellow from Ukraine.