NARA releases its annual Records Management Self-Assessment and a reminder to report fugitive documents

It takes a village … of government information librarians to make sure that government documents within scope of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) are collected, described, and distributed to FDLP libraries around the country. Here’s an example of how the FDLP safety net works for fugitive government documents — those documents that *are* within scope, but have not made their way into the FDLP system.

1. My friend Gary Price tweets about NARA’s release of its 2012 annual “Records Management Self-Assessment” which tells the good, bad and ugly about whether or not Federal agencies are compliant with statutory and regulatory records management requirements.
2. I retweeted it as I know lots of my followers are interested to know how federal agencies are doing in their archival responsibilities.
3. I checked GPO’s Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) and found that GPO has a record for it in the CGP, but that their permanent url (PURL) only has the 2009 edition saved in their archive.
4. I submitted a LostDocs form to the GPO so that they’d add 2010, 2011 and 2012 editions to their archive. I then forwarded my LostDocs receipt to the LostDocs blog to track this fugitive’s progress and seed the cloud so to speak with critical government documents.

And the cycle of government information life continues. But we need lots of volunteers reporting fugitive govt documents to GPO. When you find a document of interest online, check and report it if it’s not in the CGP. Many hands make light work!

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