August 2010 Lost Docs Report and Appeal
A special appeal to lostdocs reporters: please try to send us your report receipts the same day you receive them from GPO. While all reports are appreciated, sending reports as you receive them makes for a smoother workflow that better reflects when lostdocs/document discovery reports are received by GPO. If you use Microsoft Outlook for e-mail, you can set up a rule to send your lostdocs reports to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info automatically. Check out these two YouTube videos to see how to create rules in Outlook:
REPORT August 2010 was a deceptively light month. We only posted nine lostdocs reports. I say "deceptively light" because we received only a handful of reports until late August, when we received approximately 50 reports in two days. These reports were made from late June through late August. What couldn't be posted for August is being posted for September. Don't let this backlog stop you from sending us your current reports. I'm excited to report that of the nine reports we were able to post last month, four were quickly cataloged by GPO. You can view this list by visiting lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/found/ and looking at the postings with August 2010 dates. We are appreciative of these new records and note that the cataloged documents were all oil spill related. GPO is matching effort to newsworthiness and we commend them for it. No false positives were found in our small sample. 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.
Peeking at GPO’s Historic Shelflist
As many of you know, the Government Printing Office is transcribing their historic paper shelflist into the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP). The paper shelflist was operated from 1880 to 1992. There are over 6,000 records transcribed so far. While listening to the GPO Q&A from the Six State Virtual Conference, I learned that you can view records from the Historic Shelflist by searching the phrase "historic shelflist" in the CGP. Try it. It can be fun to specify a specific year, say 1930 or 1942. Learn more about this project by viewing a webinar titled "The GPO Historic Shelflist Project" presented in May 2010 by Laurie Hall, that is available at the GPO OPAL Archive at http://www.opal-online.org/archivegpo.htm. Continue reading
My $3.52 Worth of PACER
As you might have noticed, I was inspired to register for a PACER account because of the presentation from the Six State Virtual Conference. Today I'd like to share my brief initial experience with PACER. I received my password a few hours after applying for it. Today I logged into PACER and decided to look for documents related to Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger. I realize that some documents in this case are already publicly available, but I wanted something to search that I knew would be in the system. First I clicked on the database link for the Northern District of California, since I knew the case was heard in San Francisco. The resulting search screen offered my several choices, including searching by attorney name. I tried Theodore Olsen, knowing he was one of the attorneys. I got back two cases, but neither was Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger. I was charged $0.08. According to PACER documentation, I would have been charged $0.08 even if I had zero results. So I did a quick Google search to learn that Perry's first name was Kristen and did a party search for Kristen Perry. I immediately got Case Number 3:09-ev-02292-VRW, better known as Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger. This also cost me $0.08, but since I got a useful result, I didn't mind. I looked at the Case Summary ($0.08). I looked at the Case File Location ($0.08) and determined the case files might still be with Judge Walker. Then I looked at the Docket Report. There were 742 files associated with the case. PACER determined that this should be charged as 30 pages or $2.40. Browsing through the list I decided to pull up a 10 page letter from "Voter X" which was sent to Judge Walker during the trial. This person said they feared retaliation from pro-same sex marriage forces and represented themselves as just one of the many voters who voted for Prop 8. The letter was written like a legal brief and I suspect the author was an attorney or paralegal. Viewing and downloading this letter cost me $0.80. By now I had spent $3.52. PACER waives $10/quarter, so if I stop here, I won't be charged this quarter. But what if I wanted to look at multiple documents?. At $0.08 a page, I had 81 pages left. And if I reloaded the Docket Report a few times instead of remembering to open documents into a new browser tab, I could have only opened up a document or two before getting charged for real, because each refresh of the Docket Report would have been another $2.40/30 pages. I started playing with PACER to see if it was worth recommending registration to those library patrons looking to retrieve federal court documents. I need to think about it some more, but at the moment my feeling is that $10.00 worth of free access doesn't go very far. And it would probably be used up quickest by the very patrons I would want to recommend it to. Folks who may want a lot of briefs and filings but who are not great searchers. But I haven't totally made up my mind about this. What do you think? If you work in a non-court library, have you gotten patrons to register for PACER? What has been your experience? I do suggest that librarians should register for PACER accounts and search around to see what's available. Then decide for yourselves whether to lobby Congress to free this resource so people can explore the law without watching the meter. Continue reading
Training Sessions from the Six-State Virtual Conference Available
The Government Printing Office posted the following announcement to their FDLP-L list that seemed worth sharing:
From: Announcements from the Federal Depository Library Program On Behalf Of FDLP Listserv Sent: Wednesday, August 18, 2010 8:50 AM To: GPO-FDLP-L@LISTSERV.ACCESS.GPO.GOV Subject: Training Sessions from the Six-State Virtual Conference Available The six states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming recently held an online conference using the OPAL web conferencing software. Over 5 days, the Six-State Virtual Government Information Conference ran 17 different programs covering numerous topics of interest to Federal depository libraries and government information professionals. GPO is proud to have provided technical support for this online conference and we invite the wider FDLP community to view 15 archived sessions of the conference in the OPAL Archives at their convenience at http://www.opal-online.org/archivegpo.htm. The topics of the sessions vary greatly to cover both hot issues in depository libraries as well as training on Federal information products. Examples include: the Sunlight Foundation's address on open access, demographic and business information from the Census Bureau, tracking the usage of your online depository collection, moving to a more electronic collection, FDsys, and marketing depository collections and services, to name a few. Be sure to visit the Web page the conference organizers developed to accompany the virtual conference. The page includes links to the PowerPoint presentations, audio clips from government information specialists, a Twitter feed, OPAL information, and more. See http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/govpubs/conference/6state/index.htmIn addition to the above, there is a program on using PACER, the federal courts documents system. I've got a lot to learn about PACER and this session seems like a great place to start. We at FGI have often spoken of the need for GPO to partner with depository libraries to provide training to the wider community. We salute GPO, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming for making this conference a reality and for sharing it with the wider govinfo community. If you attended the conference or watched the videos, we'd be interested in your impressions and comments. Continue reading
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:
- 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.
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