Whether you were able to attend the Fall 2009 Depository Library Council meeting or not, don't miss what is now online!

• GPO's Fall DLC Meeting - Arlington, VA page with presentations available for downloading.
• Tweets from fall09 depository library council meeting. See a record of what people tweeted in real time at the conference.

And, don't forget that the presentation that Rebecca and I did on digital deposit is online here.

At the Fall Depository Library Council Meeting in Arlington, VA, Rebecca Blakeley gave a presentation that she and I wrote on "Demystifying Digital Deposit: What It Is and What It Could Do for the Future of the FDLP." Although a PDF version of the presentation is available on the FDLP web site, it only has the slides, not the text of the presentation.

The complete, original PowerPoint file, including the "speaker notes" with the complete text of the presentation, is available on slideshare:

• Demystifying Digital Deposit: What It Is and What It Could Do for the Future of the FDLP, by Rebecca Blakeley and Jim Jacobs, Fall DLC Meeting - Arlington, VA, October 20, 2009.

(Cross-posted on GODORT blog) At last week's Spring '09 Depository Library Conference in Tampa -- which was, to remind everyone, live-blogged! -- GODORT chair Cass Hartnett spoke on the topic "Reflections of a Mid-career Government Documents Librarian." Cass' talk was both thoughtful and thought-provoking. The video runs about an hour. During the talk, Cass handed out a list of 14 "memory questions." After viewing the video, please share your answers to the questions in the comments section below. Thanks!

1. An early library job
2. technology
3. an early career dream
4. good committee you served on or good workshop attended, or both
5. mentor(s) who helped you at the state/local level
6. up and coming student/librarian who impressed you
7. Washington D.C.
8. Library user(s)
9. future of FDLP
10. government information in everyday life
11. good article or book
12. power of description
13. digital amazement
14. Web 2.0 triumph or trouble

It's hard to believe it's been a week since the Spring '09 Depository Library Council meeting in Tampa. The live-blogging didn't work out as well as we'd hoped due to the wifi snafu (note to Hyatt Regency: WTF, there's FREE wifi at Motel 6's and their ilk, B&Bs etc, why would you charge a conference $150/day/person for wifi?! And why would you NOT have a T-Mobile Hotspot available for those who paid for wifi in their rooms?! ). On the plus side, I want to thank Shari Laster for uploading her notes to the live-blog interface and the several others (Altair77, reblakeley, danwho, rhonabwy, fakegodort, amyewest, vdglenn) who tweeted along with the conference. I put my notes up online for those who are interested. All notes and tweets have made their way into the live-blog interface.

This has been the first DLC in quite some time where the news and energy (at least for me!) has been more good than bad! Depository Library Council seemed more energetic (no offense intended to past Councils!) and had some very positive recommendations for GPO (see draft recommendations below). I'm most excited about the following:

1. recommendation to request funding for grants to states for collaborative digitization projects
2. recommendation to coordinate collaborative digitization projects

I'm not so jazzed on the recommendation to hire an outside consultant (especially a marketing consultant!), but am willing to follow along on that one and see where it leads.

I had lots of fruitful discussions with people. At one point in the Council session, someone on council asked the audience how many libraries were willing to work with GPO on digital deposit and local, distributed preservation and at least 15 hands went up right away!

People are really interested in increased access and cataloging. there's interest from quite a few depositories to reduce (some want to greatly reduce) their paper collections and only have digital. Toward that end, Chris Brown from UDenver had a great presentation on his nifty item selection tool (way to go Chris!). But there was also equally positive energy in the crowd that paper collections should not be discounted.

The thing that really warmed my heart was that the idea of digital deposit is *finally* gaining real traction. There's interest in actual digital deposit of those digital docs rather than simply having links to GPO in bibliographic records. AND, GPO officials seem genuinely interested in working on digital deposit as part of a distributed preservation plan (OMG!!! can't hardly believe that!). I'd love to hear peoples' thoughts on how digital deposit should work.

On the not-so-good side, the first session on Monday was reserved for statements from University Librarians (ULs) housing FDLP collections. From their statements, I got the feeling that documents librarians need to do a LOT more talking to our ULs. To a person, the UL perspective was that paper collections need to be digitized NOW because documents collections take up space too valuable for documents ghettos, space that they'd like to use for other (sexier?) things. I was disappointed that many of the ULs didn't stay for the other 2 days of conference because they would have seen that in fact the depository community is doing many positive things to make documents collections more useful and findable, docs librarians are working hard to reduce or save time spent on depository processes and that there are some really exciting collaborative initiatives starting to bubble up and move forward.

I'd love to hear others' reflections on DLC Spring '09. Please post in the comments sections.

DLC spring '09 Tampa NOTES WEDNESDAY

Council recommendations:

These are draft since council has not finished.

1) to meet the goals of providing no fee, permanent public access, Council recommends that GPO hire an outside consultant to deliver a range of models on how libraries can better provide govt information to the public in the 21st century for consideration by council. This consultant report will reconsider the operations of the FDLP in the context of the electronic age and possible future teechnologies. This reconsideration will address how best to maintain and utilize tangible legacy collections and US govt digital assets to best meet the information needs of the American public.

Rationale: based on feedback from the community, council feels it is crucial to have a neutral outside party develop possible new scenarios for the 21st century FDLP.

(Bernadine Abbott Hoduski suggests that GPO request JCP to get GAO to look into this rather than an outside consultant.)

2) Council further recommends that GPO request funding for grants to states ("states" to be wordsmithed) for collaborative digitization projects.

Rationale: as information users rely more and more heavily on electronic resources, it is crucial that the legacy got documents collection be digitized.

3) council further recommends that GPO create a list of libraries willing to participate in collaborative digitization projects and take the lead in coordinating these projects.

Rationale: GPO needs to take a more active role in coordination of the digitization of legacy collection. Council further feels that commercial sector digitization projects with access restrictions do not diminish GPO and FDLP responsibility to provide no fee, permanent public access to digital versions of govt publications.

4) Council further recommends that GPO report at fall 2009 meeting on efforts to simplify the discard process.

Rationale: depository discard process is extremely time consuming and burdensome for both selectives and regionals. As pressures grow both in large and small selectives to reduce collection size, the process needs to be speedier and less staff intensive.

There will be other recommendations (currently drafting) regarding item selection, quality control, dark archives, and weeding material.

Council adjourned.

We're live blogging from the Spring '09 Depository Library Council meeting (April 20 - April 22, 2009) from the glorious Hyatt Regency Hotel in Tampa Bay, FL. The Public Printer is to address GPO's role in Government Transparency at 10:30am EST today (monday). You can also track the twitter hashtag #dlc09.

Check here for agenda and schedule.

Kudos to GPO and DLC leadership for posing a series of discussion questions for Monday's meeting in Tampa. If you haven't seen the questions yet, I urge you to visit http://fdlp.gov/component/content/article/184-gpoprojects/376-new-birth-questions and ponder them whether or not you'll be in Tampa next week.

While most of the questions are good ones, there is one question that just shouldn't be asked in 2009. It is from the questions about Regionals' management and it is:

5. For more than 15 years now, certain members of the library community and the Depository Library Council have discussed redundancy and the number of comprehensive collections of content needed to ensure permanent public access. Title 44 requires that regionals retain at least one copy of all Government publications either in printed or microfacsimile form (except those authorized to be discarded by the Superintendent of Documents). In order to consider future models that may be legally permissible as requested by the library community, should regional depository libraries be able to withdraw portions or all of their tangible collection if they have access to digital equivalents? What are the long-term implications for depository library collection responsibilities necessary to achieve the FDLP's primary goal of permanent public access to both print and digital materials?

This could have been an excellent question except for (Emphasis mine):

"should regional depository libraries be able to withdraw portions or all of their tangible collection if they have ACCESS to digital equivalents?"

Access to third party servers are not a collection and never will be. Think if this was a question for an academic library:

"Should academic libraries discard part of all of their printed journals if they have a subscription to a full text serials database?"

Or even:

"Should academic libraries discard part or all of their printed journals if these journals are currently available freely over the web?"

Who wants to be holding the bag in five to seven years when the publisher goes out of business or charges more than you can afford? Will you be the one to explain the empty serials stacks to your faculty?

Neither I nor my likeminded colleagues are against digital materials. But we insist on custody. The question that SHOULD be discussed in Tampa is:

"In order to consider future models that may be legally permissible as requested by the library community, should regional depository libraries be able to withdraw portions or all of their tangible collection if they HOLD LOCAL COPIES of digital equivalents?"

My answer to that question is an enthusiastic YES! For example, if a Regional is currently participating in the USDOCS LOCKSS PLN that is caching the content of GPO Access around the country, then they (subject to changes in Title 44) should be allowed to discard their tangible holdings that correspond to what has been stored in their LOCKSS boxes. That way even if Congress mandates fee-based access next year, that Regional will still have copies of their digital materials for patrons to access over the web.

With apologies to Stanford, the local copy doesn't have to be based on the LOCKSS model, but it should be a server located at the Regional or its parent institution. The server should be capable of serving content over the internet.

I had a great time at last week's Fall 2008 Depository Library Council in Washington, D.C. (well actually Arlington, VA). Rebecca Blakeley and I had a good time live blogging DLC with a nice little free Web app called CoverItLive. It's awesome the GPO posted the proceedings and slides on fdlp.gov! I also started a space to upload presentation slides on slideshare, and have so far gotten 8 presenters to post their slides there. Slideshare is a public repository of presentations, so having everyone's slides up there would be a good way for the public to find them. DLC presentations on slideshare have been viewed from 35 to 227 times already, so if you were a presenter, I hope you'll consider uploading your slides to the dlcfall08 event.

That is all.

(I admit, I coopted that from John Hodgman, PC of those PC/Mac ads and guest blogger on boingboing. That's how John ended his posts, and I can only *hope* to be 1/100th as funny as him)

Hi all. I just landed in Washington D.C. and gearing up for Depository Library Council meeting for the next three days. I'm trying out this new tool called CoverItLive that will allow me to live blog the conference (if you want to help, let me know and I'll add you as a panelist!!). Please check back here as the window below will *hopefully* be in real time. This also depends on wireless access. Check out the meeting agenda and leave me a comment if there's anything from which you really want a report. Wish me luck!

I wanted to write about this a few days ago, but have only found the time to do so now.

The Government Printing Office (GPO) started releasing materials from the Spring 2008 Depository Library Conference even before the DLC meeting closed on April 2, 2008. You can find their materials at http://www.fdlp.gov/repository/dlc/spring08/index.html

GPO deserves credit for being prompt for the initial release of DLC materials. It is a refreshing change from a few years ago when people who couldn't make meetings had to wait many weeks for materials to be made available. So thanks GPO!

I hope to go through most of this material in the near future in more detail, but here are some items that seem like they are of special interest:

• Improved Access to EPA Information:Before and After with Web 2.0 by Brand Niemann (in 3 parts)
• Web 2.0 Power Point Presentation by Cindy Etkin of the U.S. Government Printing Office
• Back to the drawing board in Virtual and Real Worlds
• Web Harvesting Update for the Depository Library Council
• Web Scraping Government Information

Go forth and check out! Let us know what you think of what's been released.

Show notes for FGI podcast #2

Note: We still have things to learn about podcasting. This time it is audio leveling. The sound does go up and down a bit but hopefully won't be too distracting. If you have tips about equalizing volume levels in Audacity, please send them our way in one of the comment options listed below:
Today's 40 minute show had the following segments:

• FGI Roundtable - Jim A Jacobs, James R. Jacobs, Shinjoung Yeo and Daniel Cornwall discuss what led them to work with Free Government Information and what we see as the big issues facing the government information community.
• Elizabeth Cowell discusses the GPO LOCKSS pilot project at the Spring 2007 Depository Library Conference.
• Podcast Sampler - we take a quick listen to Profile America, a podcast from the US Census bureau intended to be played by broadcasters. Check out other government podcasts.
• Outro music - Scary Guy by Maria Daines used by permission. According to the story behind the song, this song was inspired by the global Scary Guy project.

Patricia Kenly from Georgia Tech has given us permission to post her powerpoint presentation describing Georgia Tech's LOCKSS program (PPT). I also added a link to it on our Spring '07 DLC page. While I wasn't at DLC, the information that I gleaned from Patricia's slides is that LOCKSS is relatively easy to administer, the hardware is cheap, LOCKSS has quickly become the library's primary strategy for digital preservation, and Georgia Tech is willing to share information with anyone. Thanks Patricia for the slides!

In September, 2005 the Depository Library Council (DLC) published Federal Government Information Environment of the 21st Century: Towards a Vision Statement and Plan of Action for Federal Depository Libraries. Discussion Paper. They're currently collecting comments on their DLC Vision blog. FGI encourages everyone to read this document, post comments to the blog, to FGI, and, if you happen to be going to the Fall, 2005 Depository Library Council meeting in D.C., raise your questions and comments there. FGI's comments to this first draft of a vision for the future Federal Depository Library Program are below.

• Here are Daniel's takes on the 4 sections of the Vision draft.
• And here is Jim's Comment on the "non-exclusive environment"
• Below are the comments of Jim Jacobs, James Jacobs and Shinjoung Yeo that were originally posted on the FGI blog

We think Daniel Cornwall's recent comments regarding the DLC Vision statement were thoughtful and thorough. We'd like to add a few additions and stress some of his more important points. We thank the DLC for opening the discussion on the future of the FDLP and offer this constructive criticism in the hope that the DLC will find some information of use to the final draft. We feel that there are strong reasons for having an FDLP into the future.

We believe that the draft could be greatly improved by changing its tone in Part I from a negative focus ("no longer exclusive...," "superseded FDLs," "curtain call for FDLP") to a positive vision of the role of libraries in the future. The tone of the current draft seems to imply that FDLP libraries need to recapture what was once a captive audience.

Rather than focusing only on "access" (and thereby ignoring and diminishing the importance for libraries to select, acquire, organize, and preserve information for a constituency), Part I could describe both the effects and opportunities of digital information distribution including the provision of new and better services. We believe that the vision statement would be improved if it, instead, took a more positive and innovative approach to the future, rather than looking to the past.

Here are some specific changes that could make it both stronger and more forward-looking.

1. On the effect of the web on access, it would be more accurate to say that the web adds a new, welcome, and very useful way for some (though far from all) citizens to get information.
2. The DLC vision should describe the opportunities for FDLs to facilitate access to ALL citizens. Many citizens still do not have broadband access, and Americans are now adopting broadband more slowly than they have in the past. Many government web sites are designed to be most effective if the user has broadband access. Therefore, there are opportunities for libraries to facilitate access to all citizens. (This can include providing public broadband terminals and having digital and print copies on hand in local collections.)
3. The vision needs to recognize that the ability of users to "access" government information is not enough; libraries should make information easier to find and use. Digitally-distributed information provides opportunities for many different aggregations and views of the vast amount of information available from the government. We already see that, for the government itself, one "portal" is not enough. FirstGov, GPO Access, fedrnd.osti.gov, science.gov, Ben's Guide, and THOMAS are just a few of the "portals" available. We take the view that more-views-are-better because each can cater to a specific user group. Libraries have the opportunity to build such views based on their own collections that include, not just federal government information, but also information from local and international governments, private publishers and institutional repositories. Libraries should encourage and facilitate such use and re-use of government information and should actively participate in such use and re-use. Providing pointers to information on servers that are not controlled by the library is only one way to do this. A more secure and sustainable approach is to build actual digital collections. By building focused, locally controlled, digital collections that include government information as well as non-government information, libraries can make it easier for users to find information.
4. While the DLC vision addresses some roles for GPO, it omits some crucial ones. One essential role for GPO is to provide no-fee, fully functional digital content. Another is to take an active approach to notifying libraries and the public of all new and changed content. Those looking for government information should not be required to browse or spider government web sites hoping to find new or changed information. The DLC vision statement should clearly state that GPO must actively notify libraries of new information based on library-defined profiles (similar to item lists) and either "push" new content to FDLP libraries or allow for the easy "pull" by libraries of content they select.
5. The vision needs to identify roles that none but libraries will fulfill. The vision statement could describe at least some of these roles. These could include selecting and organizing and integrating materials from different sources (e.g., the federal government, private sector, other governments) to create integrated collections for particular constituencies; reusing and recombining information to create new information services; and preserving information. While the private sector and the government will certainly provide some useful tools and services, it would be wrong for the library community to assume that government or market priorities will always match the needs of our users. We should not assume that others will fill in gaps left by libraries shirking their responsibilities. Libraries must also recognize that the web has not created an environment where the private sector will assume responsibilities for no-fee, permanent public access to all information for all users forever. While it makes sense to use tools created by others (e.g., Google, GPO collection, private sector products etc.) as long as they exist and are useful, libraries should not ignore their own responsibilities for providing collections, tools, and services.

While the remainder of the draft promotes the concept of "service," those parts are negatively affected by Part I. Instead of describing a future in which libraries can offer enhanced services by making use of the opportunities of digital information, the services described are rather passive and do little more than piggy-back on services actually offered by others (government and private sector).

We offer some ideas of what might be a fourth "possible future for the FDLP" in our paper, Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program (Journal of Academic Librarianship, May 2005, Vol.31, No.3, pp198-208.) particularly in the sections "The Once and Future FDLP" and "Stakeholder Roles." We won't repeat those ideas here, but instead will list a few small examples of possible future FDLP library services.

1. Information should be used and reused. A first year graduate student created GovTrack.us which draws information from THOMAS, House and Senate pages, Congressional Budget Office, and Federal Election Commission and creates new information for tracking and researching activities of Congress. What if libraries did things like this? Libraries such as Oregon State University and the California Digital Library have done just such projects in the past and can do more of this in the future, especially if digital deposit is part of the future FDLP.
2. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) (trac.syr.edu) actively acquires information from the government through FOIA and other means and assembles it for public use. Libraries equipped to accept digital deposit would also be able to include in their collections FOIA-acquired information and "fugitive" documents; in so doing they would facilitate projects like TRAC by providing regular updates of public data through their digital selection, acquisition, and delivery technologies.
3. Libraries regularly find broken "PURLs" and dutifully report them to GPO. If there was digital deposit, libraries could provide pointers to the local copy and the original so that when a PURL breaks, the user still has a copy of the document while the broken PURL is being fixed.
4. All libraries do not have all the digital amenities of large, better-funded, libraries. Many of the users of such libraries may also lack the tools (e.g., broadband access, up-to-date hardware and software), training, and experience increasingly required to find, locate, and use information on the Internet. But even small libraries could help users by acquiring copies of needed information once and adding that information to a local collection (on a stand-alone PC, or even CD or DVD) so that users could get those documents instantly rather than re-downloading them. Digital deposit could also facilitate innovative collaborations between large and small libraries.
5. While digital versions of information are often useful, the digital format is not always the most usable for simple reading, browsing, preserving, or even reference. Libraries could acquire ready-to-print versions of digital documents and print them for their print collection or provide a local print-on-demand service.
6. Academic libraries are increasingly creating Institutional Repositories (IRs) for storing digital versions of academic research. Libraries could use those IRs for storing local copies of digital government information, thus creating integrated collections from multiple sources and providing the same tools for finding and locating government information that they provide for academic research.

It seems to us that the current draft assumes that GPO will provide permanent, no-fee access to all digital government information. GPO, however, does not have the ability to make such a guarantee. Because GPO is a government agency that is subject to rules and budgets set by others, is subject to pressure from the private sector not to compete, and even has a public printer who has characterized Congressional support for permanent public no-fee access as a "hand out" rather than as an essential role of government, the DLC vision statement should not base its possible futures for the FDLP on this assumption.

Finally, we are well aware that, while a few of us have been vocally advocating digital deposit for some time, govdoc-l and other forums have not had extensive discussion of this issue. Many librarians have been quiet while a few have expressed opinions. At freegovinfo.info we did a very un-scientific survey and received 153 (92%) positive responses to the question, "Should GPO deposit digital files in FDLP libraries?" As Daniel Cornwall has suggested (govdoc-l post on 9/22/05, Subject: "85% Library Support for local deposit of federal e-pubs?") GPO's own, more comprehensive poll of FDLP libraries shows that there are few libraries (15%) that have little interest in digital deposit which implies that most libraries are interested in digital deposit. Since GPO has explicitly asked FDLP libraries about the delivery of digital content to depositories through "Automatic push of content from GPO," we suggest that DLC should have in hand the full results of the GPO study before dismissing the option of digital deposit from its vision of the future. If hundreds of libraries express a high or very high interest in this, it would be consistent to offer a fourth possible future of digital deposit.

For over 150 years, the FDLP community has worked collaboratively to inform citizens. There are very few organizations that have lasted as long for such a noble cause. We hope the DLC's revised vision will reflect this fourth possible future for a strong, vibrant FDLP that we have described.

James A. Jacobs, James R. Jacobs, Shinjoung Yeo.