REPORT

In July 2011, we received and posted 16 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 May and July 2011.

This month of the 16 reported documents posted by us, 3 (18%) have been cataloged and are 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 July 2011 dates. We are appreciative of these new records.

From July, 13 items remain listed as "fugitive documents."

No documents reported to GPO appeared to already have public CGP records. So there were no "false positives" for the month.

Two of the 3 cataloged documents had not been assigned a PURL. So these were classed "found" but with "preservation needed."

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/Update

In addition to our usual monthly report, we at the Lost Docs Blog will from time to time revisit, check, and update posted document receipts that at the time of their corresponding monthly report were still classed as fugitives. The following report focuses on the receipts posted from July-October 2009, the beginning of the Lost Docs Blog project.

Of the 46 reported fugitive documents posted July-October 2009, 19 (41.3%) have been cataloged, 5 of these since July-October 2009; 27 (58.6%) documents remain fugitives, as of July 1, 2011. We are appreciative of those records that have been created.

For more information visit the Lost Docs Blog at http://lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/. To view a list of cataloged titles visit the spreadsheet of documents at
https://spreadsheets0.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?hl=en&key=tl4VYlDzjJMGq...

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:

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."

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.

Post the blog link to your website or share it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media. Subscribe to the blog feed at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/feed/ or better yet incorporate the feed into your website or blog.

REPORT

In June 2011, we received and posted 63 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 April and June 2011.

This month of the 61 reported documents posted by us, 3 (5%) have been cataloged and are 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 June 2011 dates. We are appreciative of these new records.

From June, 54 items remain listed as "fugitive documents."

Four 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.

REPORT

In May 2011, we received and posted 60 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 March and May 2011.

This month of the 60 reported documents posted by us, 8 (13%) have been cataloged and are 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 May 2011 dates. We are appreciative of these new records.

From May, 50 items remain listed as "fugitive documents."

Two documents reported to GPO appeared to already have public CGP records and we classed them as "false positives." However, neither of these online documents have been assigned a PURL as of the date of this report, so we classed them also as "preservation needed."

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.

Earlier this week I reported on a significant report that may be hard to find and preserve (Senate Anatomy Of Financial Collapse). Here is another example of a prominent government report that may be hard to identify and preserve.

• Wegman, E.J., Scott, D.W., Said, Y.H., 2006. Ad-hoc Committee Report on the ‘Hockey Stick’ Global Climate Reconstruction, "A Report to Chairman Barton, House Committee on Energy and Commerce and to Chairman Whitfield, House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations: Paleoclimate Reconstruction." (PDF, 1.5 MB), 91pp (missing page 1) [citation based examination of item and on a footnote in the Computational Statistics & Data Analysis article listed below.]

This report is in the news this week because a scholarly journal has withdrawn a paper based on the report.

• Climate study gets pulled after charges of plagiarism, By Dan Vergano, USA Today (May 15, 2011).

Based on information in another USA Today story, (Retracted climate critics' study panned by expert, By Dan Vergano, USA Today, May 19, 2011), the retracted paper is, apparently, this one (still available as of this morning from ScienceDirect):

• Yasmin H. Said, Edward J. Wegman, Walid K. Sharabati, John T. Rigsby, Social networks of author-coauthor relationships, Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Volume 52, Issue 4, 10 January 2008, Pages 2177-2184, ISSN 0167-9473, DOI: 10.1016/j.csda.2007.07.021.
  (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V8V-4PCPFBJ-1/2/ed2ebad17...)

A hearing before the same committee, from 2006, with testimony by Wegman is available from FDsys:

• House Hearing, 109Th Congress - Questions Surrounding The 'Hockey Stick' Temperature Studies: Implications For Climate Change Assessments, U.S. House of Representatives. Committee on Energy and Commerce, July 19, 2006, July 27, 2006, Serial No. 109-128, Y 4.C 73/8

Because climate change is a contentious political issue, it is easy to find on the web lots about the original "Wegman report" and the retraction of the journal article. It is not easy to find citations to the article that has been retracted (one citation in USA Today was apparently built from a Google Scholar search and breaks). Copies of the report with the missing first page are available at a number of web sites, but I could not find it in FDsys. The only "official" copy I found (linked above) was buried on the Committee web site.

One wonders if this report will be easy to find and attribute and authenticate in a year or ten years or fifty years.

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.

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.