Accidental Govt docs librarian webinar Fugitive hunter: Jim's 1/2 to set the context James' notes: SLIDE 23: ABCs of fugitive hunting As Jim noted, the fugitive problem -- and attempted solutions to it -- has been long-standing. I'll show you a couple of ways that libraries can attack this problem head-on in the born-digital era. I've got 3 overarching messages that I hope everyone will take away from my talk today: pointing is not collecting access is not preservation Collection development is still key to the FDLP. But first, I'd like to answer the question of "Why collect digital fugitives?" Nobody would doubt that we have amazing online access to govt docs today. However, the national bibliography doesn't just create itself, and doesn't just magically appear in google search results much less the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP). In the print era, it was GPO's primary responsibility to print and distribute documents in scope of the FDLP. As Jim noted, the sheer amount of documents and number of agency publishers producing born-digital documents today means that Librarians now more than ever need to shift from passive receivers of FDLP documents to being active in the collection process. Put yourself in an information seeker's shoes. Which search result would you rather see if you were looking for information on eg "data analysis and law enforcement"? SLIDE 24: Needles Your library catalog's 134 targeted and organized, ads-free search results including this fugitive document from the Bureau of Justice Assistance "Increasing analytic capacity of state and local law enforcement agencies: moving beyond data analysis to create a vision for change" SLIDE 25: Haystacks or Google's 3.2 million search results which include ads, news items, and other random unmediated information? SLIDE 26: link rot Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is the issue of link rot. Those 3.2 million search results make it seem like the public has amazing information access. But Access today does not equal permanent public access -- which is after all the core tenet of the FDLP! -- and this access is completely at the mercy of the information producers. While the average lifespan of a physical government document is 50 years, according to the Internet Archive, the estimated lifespan of a URL is 44 - 75 days. While .gov and .mil Web sites are slightly more stable than some Web sites, “link rot,” the process by which Internet hyperlinks disappear, is a real and growing concern. According to data collected by the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group, which has been studying link rot of the .gov domain since 2008, 51% of the urls from their original 2008 data set were 404! We cannot rely on linking to government information, we must continue and actually redouble our efforts at born-digital collection development. SLIDE 27: drops oceans & reservoirs Ok, so now we know what we're up against in the born-digital era. Now I'll talk about what I'm doing at Stanford libraries. I'm not just pointing to government documents or relying on google or GPO for that matter. I'm building govt documents collections for my local community and by focusing my collecting on fugitive documents, pitching in to help build and expand the national bibliography. I'm developing tools and processes to collect individual documents drop by drop as well as the wider ocean of internet documents. SLIDE 28: EEMs (1) For individual document collection, I'm using what we at Stanford call EEMs. EEMs – or Everyday Electronic Materials – was a Mellon grant that Stanford received to build workflows and policies so that bibliographers could collect born-digital books and documents. EEMs are those documents that I find and download as I go about my daily work. EEMs are digital materials that are serendipitously referenced in news reports, distributed by postings on Web sites, or through email notification. I’m also actively tracking 8 Federal agencies (BLM, OMB, NOAA, DoJ, USDA, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE), Natl Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health (which as Jim noted has historically been one of the largest producers of fugitive documents)). Based on analysis of the lostdocs blog, these 8 agencies are particularly aggregious fugitive publishers. Besides collecting these born-digital materials, am sending any fugitives I find to GPO to be added into the CGP. I also am grateful for the 1-2 hrs/month assistance I get from Laura Lind, one of our acquisitions staff as well. The EEMs project has put in place infrastructure and a workflow to support EEMs collection, description, preservation and public access for Stanford library’s collections. ** For those chomping at the bit to know more about eems, go to this bitly link for my colleague Katherine Kott’s Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) report on the project. http://bit.ly/cni-eems SLIDE 29: EEMs (2) My EEMs workflow is pretty straight-forward, and has been put in place for all of our bibliographers' use: 1. identify the document I want to collect (*only pdfs and only monographs at this time) 2. drag url of doc to our custom EEMs browser widget 3. determine copyright status. Request permission from the copyright owner to harvest/preserve if need be (I can usually skip this step with public domain govt documents!) 4. describe the document (title, author, rights status, comments, and link back to the original site) 5. submit to acq and cataloging workflow. 6. The EEM is digitally deposited and stored locally in our Stanford digital repository and made accessible through our catalog, along with the link back to the original site/document. This is just 1 example of the over 600 EEMs that I’ve collected to date. Probably 3/4 of those have been fugitive. Think what we could do if 100 libraries – or 1000! – instituted this workflow? Collectively, we could cover all 246 federal agencies to assure that no born-digital document within scope of the FDLP falls through the cracks and becomes fugitive. SLIDE 30: web harvesting Of course, this drop-by-drop collecting is time-consuming, not just for me, but for our acquisitions and cataloging staff. For larger quantities then, and for sites that produce too many documents to make EEMs feasible, I'm using archive-it to harvest entire Web sites. Web harvesting is not a panacea, but without it, there's no way to create .gov-oriented digital archives. Archive-it is a subscription service from the Internet Archive – which by the way has many digital historic govt documents available in its text collection. It’s an easy collection-building tool whereby you give the software a list of urls (called “seeds”), schedule the crawler to harvest the seeds, and then give public access to the content collected. It’s a good way to contextualize or make sense of the ocean of content on the open Web and why I’ve built harvested collections around subject areas or document types. Since 2007 I’ve harvested: Documents Crawled: 70,395,595 Data Archived: 5.1 TB! Imagine what we could accomplish if 100 FDLP libraries joined with the GPO to do targeted Web harvesting of the .gov/.mil domain! SLIDE 31: reservoirs: By doing this work, I'm continuing the long tradition of the FDLP in creating rich, redundant, distributed collections. I realize that I can't do everything myself, so I'd like to call on the FDLP community to help build FDLP reservoirs. I know of a few other libraries who are currently working in this area -- Thank you! to S. OR U for their SODA archive digitizing and collecting documents of their bioregion including histories of first peoples, U of New Orleans and other libraries of which I’m not aware!! SLIDE 32: What you can do to help create FDLP reservoirs Here are some things that you can start doing today to help build FDLP reservoirs. 1) Keep track of your favorite agency’s publications/data. Make sure those urls are in the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine. 2) “Seed the cloud” by Submitting fugitives to GPO with their lostdocs form. (and lostdocs.freegovinfo.info,!) And saving documents to local Web servers and/or uploading them to the Internet Archive 3) Build Web-harvested collections that your local community wants/needs. The SODA archive is a perfect example of this 4) Join the "Everyday Electronic Materials" Zotero group and help us test out a newer, faster, more automatic fugitive document workflow!! (zotero.org/groups/everyday_electronic_materials) I’ve started an #FDLP IRC channel if anyone would like to share best practices, talk about how to adopt an agency, and anything else you want to discuss in terms of fugitives and digital collection development. Look for an announcement on govdoc-l about IRC in the near future. Jim and I would also be happy to meet with your state/local govinfo library groups via Skype. SLIDE 33: colophon The driving force behind the FDLP is distributed access to and preservation of government information. But the scope of the problem in the 21st century is too large for GPO or any one library to do on their own. This is OUR FDLP, it's time for everyone to pitch in. Together we can continue the FDLP rather than sit idly by while it drifts into the mists of history!