For those FGI visitors who are not also government documents librarians, you might have missed the announcement about the new Registry of U.S. Government Publication Digitization Projects. According to the Government Printing Office (GPO):
The Registry contains records for projects that include digitized copies of publications originating from the U.S. Government. The projects may or may not be Federally funded. They are from libraries, government agencies, or other non-profit institutions.
The projects in the Registry are either entirely composed of digitized, U.S. Government publications or include a substantial number of them. Access to the digitized material must be free. In the rare case where a publication includes an element that is copyrighted, e.g. an image, the metadata in the Other Information section of the Registry entries will indicate that distinction.
A Registry project entry typically includes a multi-volume publication title, a publication series title, or a specific range of a Federal agency’s publications, i.e. a set of publications identified by a classification range or by years of publication. Digitization projects are initiatives to create digitized collections of these sets of resources.
Currently the registry only contains entries for publications being digitized by GPO, but we should soon start to see other entries. I think this will well be worth keeping an eye on and thank GPO for putting it together. Hopefully it will become one more tool for libraries to show their value.
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