GOVERNMENT & SOCIAL SCIENCE INFORMATION SERVICE (GSSI) Floor 2, Doe Library University of California, Berkeley 510/642-2569 REFERENCE HOURS STUDY HALL in addition to the reference hours Monday-Thursday 9am-7pm 7pm-10pm Friday 9am-5pm --- Saturday 1pm-5pm 9am-1pm Sunday CLOSED 1pm-10pm Hours vary during summer and intersessions. See "news hours" screens on GLADIS for updates. CONTENTS Research Services Electronic Information The GSSI Collection GSSI Research Guides Floor Plan RESEARCH SERVICES The Government & Social Science Information (GSSI) Service provides reference assistance for the social sciences and government documents. Reference tools including printed and computerized bibliographies and indexes are available. They will lead to sources of information, both printed and electronic, that are not found in GLADIS and MELVYL. Reference assistance is available during the hours the listed above. For students and faculty requiring further in-depth assistance, appointments can be arranged with collection specialists responsible for building the Main Library's government documents and social science collections. Whenever you need assistance, ask at the reference desk. The GSSI Service staff can help UC Berkeley, faculty, students, and staff borrow government documents not available at UC Berkeley from other UC libraries, Stanford, or the California State Library or direct you to Interlibrary Services as appropriate. Reference assistance is available during the hours the Government & Social Science Information Service is open (see hours listed above). ELECTRONIC INFORMATION There is a CD-ROM network in the Government & Social Science Information Service. This network holds over 50 discs. Our terminals accesses discs on the Library CD-ROM Network which are physically mounted in other library locations and they can access our discs. Two of the machines also have "stand alone" CD-ROM readers that are used to access many other discs housed in GSSI. The Library also participates in a network that allows us to mount some 250 discs at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and UC DATA and access them from our machines. These discs are primarily 1990 U.S. Census. There are two other workstations, one for datafiles, and the other devoted to trade data. There are guides posted near the terminals which list titles housed in GSSI and how to access them. GSSI also has two NEXIS/LEXIS workstations available on a sign-up basis. This service is restricted to UCB faculty and students who have completed a training program (signup at the terminals). The Library also has a gopher "Infolib" which provides access to the Internet. We have pointed to various information resources from governmental agencies and social science resources through Infolib. To access the governmental information on Infolib, the path is "Resources and Databases by Subject/Government Information." To access the social science resources on Infolib, the path is "Resources and Databases by Subject." Subjects for social science resources are listed by academic discipline, e.g. "Sociology," "Political Science." THE GSSI COLLECTION The GSSI reference collection is designed to support the information demands of social science research at UCB. It is a reference collection with Indexes consisting of much of the former government documents reference collection as well as social science indexes and bibliographies and newly acquired materials. The Census Section contains a complete historical run of the United States population and housing censuses from the first census conducted in 1790 to the twenty first conducted in 1990. The Journals collection contains current issues of approximately 150 important journals in the social sciences and bound backsets of ten core social science journals. An Open Reserve collection is planned for graduate seminars each semester. There are four photocopy machines and two microfiche reader/printers. GSSI print and fiche collections do not circulate. GSSI RESEARCH GUIDES Several guides have been written to better access parts of the GSSI and Main Library collections of government documents and social science materials. They are available in hard copy and via Infolib, the UC Berkeley Library gopher. The titles are as follows: African-American Resources Asian-American Resources California Legislative and Regulatory Sources 1980 Census 1990 Census (updated frequently) Computerized Information in GSSI Development Information from Govt Sources The European Union Major Statistics Indexes Model United Nations Native American Resources Patents and Trademarks United Nations United Nations Specialized Agencies There are other, point-of-use, guides such as the list of CD-ROM titles in GSSI, and guides to materials like the National Trade Data Bank and other CD-ROM products and software. GSSI FLOORPLAN Floor 2, Doe Library [paste floorplan here] Contributed by Christof Galli, Univ. of Calif. at Berkeley