July 2010 Lost Docs Report and Appeal

Note: There was no report for June 2010 owing to scheduling difficulties. Reports sent to us in late May through July were posted in July.

REPORT

In July 2010, we posted 32 “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.

Of the 32 reported items that were posted to the blog in July, two 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 July 2010 dates. We are appreciative of these new records.

This month we reluctantly concluded that two of the items reported to GPO and posted to the blog in July were already in the Catalog of Government Publications. You can view these items by visiting lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/false/ and looking for items with July 2010 dates.

We say “reluctantly concluded” because of two factors. First, the people who made these particular reports have a reputation for checking the catalog before submitting their reports. Second, both of these reports were for electronic documents and it appears from the 005 Marc fields that the records were worked on after the date of the fugitive document report. This almost sounds like URLs were added to a preexisting record. Were this the case, then we’d class these two e-docs as “found” rather than “false positive”. But since the most recently published GPO cataloging policy we’re aware of says they create new records for every format, we can’t say for certain that adding a URL to an existing print record is what happened.

If you have a good explanation for these records or are aware of a change in GPO cataloging policy, please let us know.

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.

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