State Documents

About the Documents

The Leavenworth Public Library is a depository for documents produced by the Kansas state government. These documents include a wide variety  of resources from the annual reports of state agencies to directories of state programs. In spite of the endless variety and usefulness of these documents, many patrons do not even know we have them. With the exception of a few of the more important items, most of the Kansas documents are not cataloged. This guide is meant to provide our patrons with an idea of the wealth of information to be had from these state documents. To do this we have gone through the our documents collection and inventoried the documents we have. We have also created a listing of Kansas and Federal government web sites. That inventory and web site lists have been placed on this web site to give you, the patron, better access to the collection.  It should be noted that this site is not meant to be an all inclusive catalog of our state documents collection. There are a few documents in the collection that were not included in the inventory because they had no discernible value. There are also those state documents that had so much importance that they were put on our online catalog. However, this site can provide patrons and library staff alike with a point from which to start their research.

Top 

Government Documents at LVPL

The Leavenworth Public Library is a selective depository. That means that we only receive those documents in preselected categories. As state documents are produced, the Kansas State Library in Topeka collects copies which they accumulate until they have a full shipment. Then they ship them to the Leavenworth Public Library. There are other depository libraries, like the government documents library on the KU campus, that collect all the document produced by the state government. The vast majority of our documents are placed in hanging files in two filing cabinets that are located near the library's vertical file. The documents are arranged by subject headings. For example, the annual report of the Kansas State Historical Society would be found in a hanging file folder entitled Kansas State Historical Society.  There are over 90 subject headings, and prior to the creation of this guide the only way to know what was in them was to go to the library and look through them. There was a listing of subject headings from which patrons and staff could try to guess under which heading their information was.

Top 

A Brief History of Kansas Government Documents

In 1911, the Kansas state legislature past a provision to make documents produced by the state government available to the public. Under the system, regents schools and the Kansas State Historical Society were designated as depositories for state documents. That was the extent of the depository system in Kansas for over six decades. In the mid 1970s, the modern state documents system was set up. The Kansas State Library created a cataloging system for state documents and expanded the depository system to include non Regents institutions. Under the old system regents schools and the state historical society received every document that was produced by the state government. The new depository libraries were designated as full or selective depositories. Selective depositories, like the Leavenworth Public Library, were allowed to select which documents they received to tailor their documents collections to their patrons' needs. They were also given the right to organize those documents in what ever manner they saw fit, and to eliminate any items that were no longer needed. The first shipment of state documents was sent to the new depositories in 1977 under the direction of Bruce Flanders. The current state documents librarian is Bill Sowers.

Top