Librarians, using research technologies like electronic databases, make complex organizations credible and efficient. Librarians, through their access to most published work in infinite professional fields, open doors to documented dissenting opinions - to critical thought.

The California State Library (CSL) is California state government’s leading research library. The librarians in the CSL’s services bureau help state employees ground California’s administrative and political world in fact by showing the way to statistics and arguments that become the foundations of California policy.

As one of their services to government workers, CSL librarians will email, fax or interoffice an article from, say, a News Bank source like the Los Angeles Times to a government worker’s workplace. Or, if the researcher has time, he or she can travel to a CSL branch in Sacramento or San Francisco and log onto the CSL databases and explore.

Sometimes though, the time it takes for a librarian to retrieve and fax an article is too long for a deadline-pressured researcher to wait: five minutes is a lifetime when your boss needs stats for her speech in an hour about 2000’S welfare cuts.

That’s changed. The CSL’s electronic databases are now available on every state worker’s PC desktop in the state of California.

CSL librarian Julie Davidson, in an article for Today’s Supervisor, explains the program to state workers: