Bernadine’s Office Building

Bernadine’s Office Building: Working in the Capitol and Other Dangerous Places recounts the professional career of Bernadine Abbott Hoduski, a long-time government documents librarian and activist for freedom of speech, freedom of information, and access to government information.

Beginning with her earliest years working as a page in her local public library in Kansas City and being inspired to pursue her MLS at the University of Denver, her narrative then follows her early professional career as the documents librarian at Central Missouri State University and then the founder and director of the EPA Region library in Kansas City, Missouri. From there, she entered service in the U.S. federal government and was the first librarian employed as a professional staff member of the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing (JCP), where she worked for twenty years.

Among her accomplishments are helping to organize documents librarians through the creation of the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) of the American Library Association, lobbying the Congressional JCP to direct the Superintendent of Documents to automate the cataloging of government documents using LC MARC software and Anglo American cataloging rules, and leading the campaign to persuade Congress to pass the “GPO Access Act of 1993″ which authorized the Government Printing Office to provide free public access to electronic government information.

Francis Buckley, retired Superintendent of Documents, writes that Bernadine Abbott Hoduski’s memoir is “library history by the person who made it happen.” Along the way, she also presents her involvement in the fight for free speech during campus civil rights protests at Central Missouri State University in the late 1960s, as well as the dramatic tension of being “on the ground” in Moscow at a meeting of IFLA during the August, 1991 attempted coup.

Bernadine Abbott Hoduski was a long-time government documents librarian in both academic and governmental libraries, including twenty years as a professional staff member of the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing (JCP) in Washington, D.C., where she also taught government documents at Catholic University. She was the co-editor of Documents to the People, federal documents editor for the Government Publications Review, and wrote a column for The Unabashed Librarian. She is the author of Lobbying for Libraries and the Public’s Access to Government Information: An Insider’s View (Scarecrow Press, 2003), and chaired both the ALA Committee on Legislation and the GODORT Legislation Committee. She is now retired and lives in Missouri.