Greetings from The Civic Librarian!
And a dive into tracking down the crucial document behind the Biden Administration's vaccine-or-test mandates.
Hi there! My name is Audrey, and I am a librarian who is passionate about connecting people with resources that facilitate civic curiosity and engagement. At my day job as a reference librarian, I consistently witness the impact that information access can have on individuals and their communities.
In this newsletter, I focus on online government information because access to it is essential. It empowers us to understand how our society functions, helps us keep our government accountable, keeps us informed, and meets important needs. The world of government information is also fascinating. There is always more to discover and learn!
By subscribing to my newsletter, you will receive one email a week in your inbox on Sunday mornings. In each newsletter, I will highlight a news story or event that relates to accessing government information. I will also do a deep dive into a significant resource, document, or piece of information related to that topic and provide you with the tools to explore it yourself. Follow the newsletter each week to experience the immense variety of topics that government information covers. I guarantee that some will surprise you!
Thank you for reading! I hope this project will prove interesting and valuable. Most of all, I hope it will empower you, the reader, to stay engaged, informed, and curious.
With that, let’s move on to the very first newsletter from The Civic Librarian!
In Civics this Week: Vaccines.gov
On Saturday, December 18th, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed a previous ruling that blocked the Biden Administration from mandating employers with 100+ workers to require employee COVID-19 vaccinations or, as an alternative, mandatory weekly testing (known as the COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard, administered through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration - Department of Labor). While reading through various news articles about this ruling, I was particularly struck by the image selected by NPR for their coverage of this event (shown below):
This is a photo1 of President Biden from a White House event on October 14th to do with his administration’s vaccination requirements that, if successfully carried out, would implicate about 100 million Americans according to the White House’s Vaccination Requirements Report .2 In the photo, President Biden is standing in front of a screen advertising vaccines.gov. Though this website existed previously, it was reintroduced in April of 2021 with new tools including a vaccine search tool, a text line, and a Spanish language version of the site.
Since the relaunch, the website now includes direct links to book vaccine appointments at sites across the country. It is a valuable resource because it provides important information in a concise and understandable manner, and it also streamlines vaccine registrations. Not only that, but its accessibility to the public is increased with the text line advertised underneath the URL.
I find it exciting to see a government information resource made more accessible through visual marketing like this. It is an effective way to connect folks with an efficient search tool.
86 FR 61402 and The Federal Register
Let’s get back to the document at the heart of this recent court ruling on the vaccine-or-test rule. On the OSHA page about the Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS), you’ll find an entire information guide on the actual ETS text as well as its litigation. You may note that there is an announcement on this page indicating that the ETS was published in the Federal Register on November 5, 2021. While you can technically find a direct link to the published document in question under the section entitled, “About the Standard”, that one isolated link doesn’t properly contextualize the document. Let’s take the opportunity to explore the Federal Register (the official journal of the U.S. Government that publishes Federal agency documents every weekday) itself and figure out how to find this document.
There are a few different searches you could perform to find the vaccine-or-test ETS this way. Here’s what I did after arriving on federalregister.gov:
As this was a recent publication, I clicked on the “Current Issue” header in green, and selected November 5, 2021 from the calendar on the right.
From there, I used the filter on the right to narrow by agency and clicked on “Occupational Safety and Health Administration”.
At this point, you can access and read the original ETS text, cited as 86 FR 61402 (86 = the volume, FR = Federal Register, 61402 = page number in vol. 86).3 If you’ve been wondering what exactly is covered by this ETS, now you can examine the source itself!
The Federal Register is a fantastic publication to get familiar with. Through this publication, the U.S. government gives us access to new or updated rules and regulations from federal agencies, as well as presidential documents and other proceedings. Printed by the Government Publishing Office, it has actually only existed since 1935 (when people hear the name, they often think it dates back to the founding of the country!).
Publications in the Federal Register are subsequently codified in the Code of Federal Regulations. For 86 FR 61402, look on the right under “Document Details” and then “CFR”, and you will see the citations for the CFR title and section that this regulation has been assigned (we could then visit ecfr.gov to track down the CFR publication of the document, but that rabbit hole is for another day! Instead, see my footnotes for citations).
Federalregister.gov provides easy access to government publications by using an unofficial, XML-based HMTL format to display documents and their pertinent details in addition to providing permanent links to the official PDF format of the Federal Register. Rather than sifting through the original publication, federalregister.gov allows you to browse and perform complex searches for documents included in the register. For this example of 86 FR 61402, I chose to insert a picture of the HTML version of the ETS (above), as it is easier to read and contextualize than the PDF (explore the PDF of the current issue to see what I mean).
If you’re interested, you can read more about the advantages of using federalregister.gov here. If you want to hear about goings-on with the Federal Register, such as an explanation of what happens to the publication when the government shuts down, check out their blog!
Thanks for reading! If you want to see what’s in store for next week, hit subscribe!
Angerer, Drew/ Getty images. Photograph. NPR. December 18, 2021. https://www.npr.org/2021/12/17/1065401498/bidens-osha-vaccine-mandate-test-million-workers.
The White House, White House Report, Vaccination Requirements are Helping Vaccinate More People, Protect Americans from COVID-19, and Strengthen the Economy. October 7, 2021. Accessed December 18, 2021. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp- content/uploads/2021/10/Vaccination-Requirements-Report.pdf.
COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing; Emergency Temporary Standard, 86 Fed. Reg. 61402 (November 5, 2021) (to be codified at 29 CFR 1910 ; 29 CFR 1915 ; 29 CFR 1917 ; 29 CFR 1918 ; 29 CFR 1926 ; 29 CFR 1928).