One of the best parts of my job at the State Library of Kansas is working with three fine people who do quality work providing public access to information on Kansas state government. A lot of what is done might seem to many to be tedious labors but the final product is often more than worth the effort. A good example of this are the Biennial Reports of state agencies, 1958/60-1978/80 extracted from the Kansas Biennial Reports, 1960-1980.
These huge volumes were issued as a compendium of over 100 state agency reports for two decades. They account as summaries of the activities of state government, giving researchers a look into the workings of state departments, institutions, boards and commissions... some long forgotten. Most of the reports give short histories of the agency, their budgets, accomplishments and a list of recent publications.
Trista Philippi digitized the 21 volumes of these reports, some over one thousand pages. Rita Troxel edited the digitized copies and created bookmarks listing every agency. Then, when we decided to separate the individual agency reports into collections, Vicky Wolf extracted the reports, set them up in collections and is still in the process of entering them into the KGI Online Library and cataloging them all on OCLC. Whew! That's a lot of work.
The outcome: a growing collection of individual state agency/institutional reports of use to historians and general researchers interested in the activities of state government 40-60 years ago.
There's a lot of recent literature on the current need for libraries. This is one small example of what libraries have done and continue to do as centers of research providing free resources to the public.
You can view these reports online at the State Library of Kansas' KGI Online Library here:
Agency Reports Extracted from Kansas Biennial Reports
1960-1980