Government Documents

The Government Documents area of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library has been closed due to damage from Hurricane Katrina. Meanwhile, Tulane students and faculty will find that our online government publications and databases are still accessible via the library web site.

During Hurricane Katrina the basement of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library building was flooded by nine feet of water and Government Documents had been among the collections located in the basement. The disaster manager company Belfor quickly arrived on the scene to limit the damages. While pumping the water out, Belfor also installed an elaborate series of generators and large tubes to pump dry air into the building. It employed a team of more than 100 laborers in special white suits and masks, along with about a dozen coordinating staff for this task.

However, we believe that we were able to salvage only about 10 percent of the Government Documents collection. Now we will review the materials that were salvaged and try to restore what we can, then work to replace what we lost otherwise. For information about donating materials or funds toward this effort, contact Eric Wedig, the library’s Government Documents Librarian and History Bibliographer.

Materials on the upper floors of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library were undamaged.

The library's Government Documents department was one of the oldest and largest federal depositories in Louisiana, established by Congress in 1884.

It housed more than 750,000 items in print and in a variety of formats. As a selective depository ordering about 60 percent of the documents available from the U.S. Government Printing Office, the collection regularly received thousands of documents covering a huge range of subjects and issues. These documents included nearly all of those generated by the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Department of Labor, and the U.S. Congress.