I want government documents
May 28, 2012 | Ranald | Comments (0)
I want demographics. I want numbers about people. I'm in grade 12 (it's a Jirō Taniguchi comic set in Ontario) and my homework for the "Health Care and Society" part of my course is to "identify current health care issues from recent media coverage and describe their societal implications" (The Ontario Curriculum, grades 11 and 12. Technological Education (2009), C2.2, p. 244).
It's the government that normally publishes demographics and numbers about people, the material basic to describing "societal implications." So to want this base material is to want government documents.
To find them, without having to be as clever and stubborn as a librarian, I can use a Google search engine that has been customized to search only Canadian government documents.
Such an engine is available on the MADGIC (Maps, Data & Government Information Centre) page of the Queen's University website and on the Government Information page of the Carleton University Library website.
The health care issue with recent media coverage I'm going to identify is obesity. As recently as May 23, The Globe and Mail published an article on obesity, "War on child obesity."
Searching with the Queen's search engine, and merely entering the keyword "obesity," the first page of results...
... includes the useful report Obesity in Canada (2011). No cleverness, no stubbornness, needed.
Note 1. The Queen's and Carleton search engines will become more and more useful as more government documents are published only online, as all federal documents will be by 2014.
Note 2. There is, of course, already an abundance of not only Canadian government documents but also documents published in other jurisdictions, intergovernmental documents and non-governmental documents available online. You can alter the scope of the search on the Queen's site from the menu under the search window.
E.g. merely re-entering the keyword "obesity" (with perhaps a dawning stubbornness, if with as little cleverness as before) and selecting "Intergovernmental organizations" from the menu under the search window, the first page of the "19,100,000" hits (2:50 pm, May 26) yielded a WHO fact sheet, "Obesity and overweight" (May 2012), that I could use to put Canadian numbers into perspective.
