On behalf of Free Government Information (FGI), I am pleased to announce that a three member team of volunteers is taking over the posting and management of the Lost Docs Blog at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info. Your new maintainers are:

Meredith Johnston - Self described independent scholar with an MLIS and a MA. GODORT member since 2007.

Jeffrey Hartsell-Gundy - Government Information & Law Librarian of the Miami University Libraries. He blogs documents for the University at www.lib.muohio.edu/blog/71.

John Cash - Catalog specialist at Wells Library, Indiana University with over 10 years worth of documents experience.

We at FGI are pleased that these three documents community members are stepping forward to continue the process of illuminating the fugitive document submissions to GPO. How the blog works will remain the same. Keep sending your fugitive documents receipts from GPO to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info.

I am still in the process of training the new team in posting, tagging and reporting on new fugitive reports. Thanks in advance for your continuing patience during this transition time.

As part of the search to save federal dollars, Senator Tom Coburn has introduced S 674, the Congressional Record Printing Savings Act of 2011.

This act may save up to $8 million a year by reducing "unnecessary" printing of the Congressional Record. You can find the text through Open Congress.

We at FGI are not opposed in principle to printing fewer copies of government publications as long as permanant public access and preservation issues are adequately addressed.

We don't believe this particular bill does so. We see three main problems with the "Congressional Record Printing Savings Act of 2011":

1. The bill only gives gpo 45 days to determine the appropriate number of printed archival copies. - There is little published research on the appropriate number of printed copies for preservation purposes, and most of the available research deals with periodicals. Some original research needs to be done specifically for government publications and this couldn't be completed in 45 days.
2. The bill is silent on where these copies should be stored. - This legislation directs GPO to determine a number of preservation copies, but doesn't state where these copies would be stored. Will the copies provided to Congress count? Will geographic distribution be taken into account? Will some be mandated to be stored in libraries? We the public don't know and we should before accepting a diminished number of copies.
3. It misses an opportunity to deposit the electronic CR to depository libraries as an additional anti-tampering safeguard. - If the printed copy of the Congressional Record is going to be diminished, then assuring the authencity and permanent public access to the electronic Congressional Record will gain in importance. Keeping multiple electronic copies in non-federal hands would be an important safeguard against future alterations of the Congressional Record and ought to be considered by Congress.

If the Congressional Record is an interest of yours and you agree with our concerns, consider contacting your Members of Congress.

January was a slow month for the Lost Docs Blog. Only six fugitive documents were reported to us. Since that hardly seems worth analyzing, we'll be issuing a combined Jan/Feb report and appeal the first weekend of March.

February is looking up. As of this writing, we already have 12 reports to post.

REPORT

In December 2010, we received and posted 39 reports to GPO from librarians reporting documents that had seemingly fallen through the cracks of the cataloging process. The reports were originally sent to GPO between October and December 2010.

This month was a great one for cataloging lost documents. Of the 39 reported documents posted by us, 17 (44%) have been cataloged and in the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) as of this writing. See these records for yourself by visiting lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/found/ and looking at the postings with December 2010 dates. We are appreciative of these new records.

From December, 16 items remain listed as "fugitive documents", with four others remain listed as "pending", where GPO has indicated an item will be cataloged, but no public record in the CGP is available.

You can view the pending items lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/pending/ and looking at the postings with December 2010 dates. The fugitive items are available at http://lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/lost/.

Two documents reported to GPO appeared to already have public CGP records and we classed them as "false positives."

Please remember that our listing of "fugitive documents" reports is only as complete as you make it, since GPO does not yet publish any statistics we're aware of on fugitive documents/document discovery.

APPEAL

If you like the concept of a public listing of fugitive documents reported to GPO, there are a number of easy ways to help us:

1. If you report a fugitive document to GPO, send your e-mailed receipt to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info. We welcome any item reported to GPO in the past month. It is best if you can send us the receipt the same day you get it from GPO. Some e-mail programs will support auto-forwarding. If so, please consider autoforwarding items where the subject contains "lostdocs submission."
2. Visit the blog at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info and comment on the listed items. Comments can include -- Did your library receive the item? Did you find it in the CGP? Do you think the item is out of scope for the CGP? Did you report the item as well and so on.
3. Post the blog link to your website or share it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media.
4. Subscribe to the blog feed at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/feed/
   or better yet incorporate the feed into your website or blog.

In the past year or so that we have been tracking lost docs/document discovery reports, we've been made aware of 67 publications that appear to have been cataloged by the Government Printing Office in response to a lost docs report. We've created a spreadsheet of documents with the date reported and the date of the CGP catalog record. We have now made this spreadsheet public at https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjA1ChZ8rDu5dGw0VllsRHpqSk1HcXctM1dMQVlBMWc&hl=en and will keep it up to date.

A few cautions in using data from this spreadsheet:

1) This is probably not the full list of items cataloged in response to lost docs reports. We check the cataloging status of documents the month after they are posted. This catches some, but not all items eventually cataloged. Ideally we'd have someone run the entire list of fugitive and pending documents through the CGP once a aweek, but we don't have staffing for that. If you'd like like to volunteer, send a note to dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net.

2) We have no way of knowing for sure that a given item was cataloged in response to a specific report.

3) Although the spreadsheet offers an average and median number of days to catalog a document, those figures are only for the publications on the spreadsheet. Since we don't get notified of all the documents reported as fugitive to GPO nor all of our reports that eventually get cataloged, we can't come up with an actual solid figure for how long it takes GPO to acquire and catalog items. Our sample of 67 as of 12/4/2010 may or may not be representative.

But at least it's a place to start until GPO starts publishing their own fugitive document/document discovery statistics.

REPORT

Note from Daniel: My apologies for missing a report last month. I was carried away by National Novel Writing Month. I'm back on the job with some pretty positive news for October and November postings to the Lost Docs Blog

Before we jump into statistics, we need to announce a new category called "pending." "Pending" means that that report forwarded to us includes a statement by GPO that they are in the process of either adding an item to the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) and/or adding it to the FDLP. The category of "pending" is being given to documents posted in November 2010 and later. Items with status of "pending" will be changed to "found" when we become aware of a publicly accessible record in the CGP.

The best news we have for you from two months of light posting (October - 15, November - 11) is that the number of "found" items is going up - 9 records from (presumably) lost docs reports in October and another 4 records created from (presumably) lost docs reports in November. See these records for yourself at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/found/ and looking at the postings with October and November 2010 dates. We are appreciative of these new records and note that the time for public cataloging of reported materials appears to be decreasing.

From October, six items remain listed as "fugitive documents", with one item being for an electronic copy that does have a record for the physical item.

From November, no item reported remains classed as a "fugitive document." Seven items are classed as "pending", acknowledged as in scope by GPO but without a publicly accessible record in the CGP. You can view these items lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/pending/ and looking at the postings with October 2010 dates.

Please remember that our listing of "fugitive documents" reports is only as complete as you make it, since GPO does not yet publish any statistics we're aware of on fugitive documents/document discovery.

APPEAL

If you like the concept of a public listing of fugitive documents reported to GPO, there are a number of easy ways to help us:

1. If you report a fugitive document to GPO, send your e-mailed receipt to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info. We welcome any item reported to GPO in the past month. It is best if you can send us the receipt the same day you get it from GPO. Some e-mail programs will support auto-forwarding. If so, please consider autoforwarding items where the subject contains "lostdocs submission."
2. Visit the blog at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info and comment on the listed items. Comments can include -- Did your library receive the item? Did you find it in the CGP? Do you think the item is out of scope for the CGP? Did you report the item as well and so on.
3. Post the blog link to your website or share it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media.
4. Subscribe to the blog feed at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/feed/
   or better yet incorporate the feed into your website or blog.

REPORT

In September 2010, we posted 31 "lost docs" e-mail receipts sent by GPO to the librarians who reported these missing documents. These civic minded librarians in turn e-mailed us their receipts. How many reports did GPO receive? Only they know, but the more people who send their fugitive docs e-mail receipts to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info, the more accurate our count will be.

Of the 31 reported items that were posted to the blog in September, seven items have been cataloged by GPO since the initial report. You can view this list by visiting lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/found/ and looking at the postings with September 2010 dates. We are appreciative of these new records.

Actually, if you view the list of "found" documents, you'll notice 12 entries, five of which are also marked "fugitive." In these five instances, we have been provided a note that GPO intends to catalog these items. However there was no publicly available record in the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) when we searched those titles.

We will take the "fugitive" tag off those records if we're made aware of a CGP record

In our view, eight of the items reported to GPO and posted to the blog in January were either out of scope for the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) or were already in the catalog. You can view these items by visiting lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/false/ and looking for items with March 2010 dates.

Most of these "false positive" items relate to the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill and may reflect proactive activity on GPO's part to get any oil spill related documents. If so, we commend them.

APPEAL

If you like the concept of a public listing of fugitive documents reported to GPO, there are a number of easy ways to help us:

1. If you report a fugitive document to GPO, send your e-mailed receipt to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info. We welcome any item reported to GPO in the past month. It is best if you can send us the receipt the same day you get it from GPO. Some e-mail programs will support auto-forwarding. If so, please consider autoforwarding items where the subject contains "lostdocs submission."
2. Visit the blog at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info and comment on the listed items. Comments can include -- Did your library receive the item? Did you find it in the CGP? Do you think the item is out of scope for the CGP? Did you report the item as well and so on.
3. Post the blog link to your website or share it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media.
4. Subscribe to the blog feed at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/feed/
   or better yet incorporate the feed into your website or blog.

REPORT

August 2010 was a deceptively light month. We only posted nine lostdocs reports. I say "deceptively light" because we received only a handful of reports until late August, when we received approximately 50 reports in two days. These reports were made from late June through late August. What couldn't be posted for August is being posted for September. Don't let this backlog stop you from sending us your current reports.

I'm excited to report that of the nine reports we were able to post last month, four were quickly cataloged by GPO. You can view this list by visiting lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/found/ and looking at the postings with August 2010 dates. We are appreciative of these new records and note that the cataloged documents were all oil spill related. GPO is matching effort to newsworthiness and we commend them for it.

No false positives were found in our small sample.

APPEAL

If you like the concept of a public listing of fugitive documents reported to GPO, there are a number of easy ways to help us:

1. If you report a fugitive document to GPO, send your e-mailed receipt to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info. We welcome any item reported to GPO in the past month. It is best if you can send us the receipt the same day you get it from GPO. Some e-mail programs will support auto-forwarding. If so, please consider autoforwarding items where the subject contains "lostdocs submission."
2. Visit the blog at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info and comment on the listed items. Comments can include -- Did your library receive the item? Did you find it in the CGP? Do you think the item is out of scope for the CGP? Did you report the item as well and so on.
3. Post the blog link to your website or share it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media.
4. Subscribe to the blog feed at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/feed/
   or better yet incorporate the feed into your website or blog.

As many of you know, the Government Printing Office is transcribing their historic paper shelflist into the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP). The paper shelflist was operated from 1880 to 1992. There are over 6,000 records transcribed so far.

While listening to the GPO Q&A from the Six State Virtual Conference, I learned that you can view records from the Historic Shelflist by searching the phrase "historic shelflist" in the CGP. Try it. It can be fun to specify a specific year, say 1930 or 1942.

Learn more about this project by viewing a webinar titled "The GPO Historic Shelflist Project" presented in May 2010 by Laurie Hall, that is available at the GPO OPAL Archive at http://www.opal-online.org/archivegpo.htm.

As you might have noticed, I was inspired to register for a PACER account because of the presentation from the Six State Virtual Conference. Today I'd like to share my brief initial experience with PACER.

I received my password a few hours after applying for it. Today I logged into PACER and decided to look for documents related to Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger. I realize that some documents in this case are already publicly available, but I wanted something to search that I knew would be in the system.

First I clicked on the database link for the Northern District of California, since I knew the case was heard in San Francisco.

The resulting search screen offered my several choices, including searching by attorney name. I tried Theodore Olsen, knowing he was one of the attorneys. I got back two cases, but neither was Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger. I was charged $0.08. According to PACER documentation, I would have been charged $0.08 even if I had zero results.

So I did a quick Google search to learn that Perry's first name was Kristen and did a party search for Kristen Perry. I immediately got Case Number 3:09-ev-02292-VRW, better known as Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger. This also cost me $0.08, but since I got a useful result, I didn't mind.

I looked at the Case Summary ($0.08). I looked at the Case File Location ($0.08) and determined the case files might still be with Judge Walker. Then I looked at the Docket Report. There were 742 files associated with the case. PACER determined that this should be charged as 30 pages or $2.40.

Browsing through the list I decided to pull up a 10 page letter from "Voter X" which was sent to Judge Walker during the trial. This person said they feared retaliation from pro-same sex marriage forces and represented themselves as just one of the many voters who voted for Prop 8. The letter was written like a legal brief and I suspect the author was an attorney or paralegal. Viewing and downloading this letter cost me $0.80.

By now I had spent $3.52. PACER waives $10/quarter, so if I stop here, I won't be charged this quarter. But what if I wanted to look at multiple documents?. At $0.08 a page, I had 81 pages left. And if I reloaded the Docket Report a few times instead of remembering to open documents into a new browser tab, I could have only opened up a document or two before getting charged for real, because each refresh of the Docket Report would have been another $2.40/30 pages.

I started playing with PACER to see if it was worth recommending registration to those library patrons looking to retrieve federal court documents. I need to think about it some more, but at the moment my feeling is that $10.00 worth of free access doesn't go very far. And it would probably be used up quickest by the very patrons I would want to recommend it to. Folks who may want a lot of briefs and filings but who are not great searchers.

But I haven't totally made up my mind about this. What do you think? If you work in a non-court library, have you gotten patrons to register for PACER? What has been your experience?

I do suggest that librarians should register for PACER accounts and search around to see what's available. Then decide for yourselves whether to lobby Congress to free this resource so people can explore the law without watching the meter.