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Lostdocs Spreadsheet of Fugitives Cataloged by GPO Now Available
In the past year or so that we have been tracking lost docs/document discovery reports, we've been made aware of 67 publications that appear to have been cataloged by the Government Printing Office in response to a lost docs report. We've created a spreadsheet of documents with the date reported and the date of the CGP catalog record. We have now made this spreadsheet public at https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjA1ChZ8rDu5dGw0VllsRHpqSk1HcXctM1dMQVlBMWc&hl=en and will keep it up to date. A few cautions in using data from this spreadsheet: 1) This is probably not the full list of items cataloged in response to lost docs reports. We check the cataloging status of documents the month after they are posted. This catches some, but not all items eventually cataloged. Ideally we'd have someone run the entire list of fugitive and pending documents through the CGP once a aweek, but we don't have staffing for that. If you'd like like to volunteer, send a note to dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net. 2) We have no way of knowing for sure that a given item was cataloged in response to a specific report. 3) Although the spreadsheet offers an average and median number of days to catalog a document, those figures are only for the publications on the spreadsheet. Since we don't get notified of all the documents reported as fugitive to GPO nor all of our reports that eventually get cataloged, we can't come up with an actual solid figure for how long it takes GPO to acquire and catalog items. Our sample of 67 as of 12/4/2010 may or may not be representative. But at least it's a place to start until GPO starts publishing their own fugitive document/document discovery statistics. Continue reading
October/November 2010 Lost Docs Report and Appeal
REPORT
Note from Daniel: My apologies for missing a report last month. I was carried away by National Novel Writing Month. I'm back on the job with some pretty positive news for October and November postings to the Lost Docs BlogBefore we jump into statistics, we need to announce a new category called "pending." "Pending" means that that report forwarded to us includes a statement by GPO that they are in the process of either adding an item to the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) and/or adding it to the FDLP. The category of "pending" is being given to documents posted in November 2010 and later. Items with status of "pending" will be changed to "found" when we become aware of a publicly accessible record in the CGP. The best news we have for you from two months of light posting (October - 15, November - 11) is that the number of "found" items is going up - 9 records from (presumably) lost docs reports in October and another 4 records created from (presumably) lost docs reports in November. See these records for yourself at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/found/ and looking at the postings with October and November 2010 dates. We are appreciative of these new records and note that the time for public cataloging of reported materials appears to be decreasing. From October, six items remain listed as "fugitive documents", with one item being for an electronic copy that does have a record for the physical item. From November, no item reported remains classed as a "fugitive document." Seven items are classed as "pending", acknowledged as in scope by GPO but without a publicly accessible record in the CGP. You can view these items lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/pending/ and looking at the postings with October 2010 dates. Please remember that our listing of "fugitive documents" reports is only as complete as you make it, since GPO does not yet publish any statistics we're aware of on fugitive documents/document discovery. 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.
Transcripts and proceedings for Fall ’10 DLC conference now available
Transcripts from the Fall 2010 Federal Depository Library Council Meeting are now available. Proceedings from the Meeting are available. Also available from the proceedings page are:
- Kick off speech from Bob Tapella, Public Printer of the United States
- Kick off speech from Ric Davis, Director, Library Services and Content Management
- Final Schedule of Events
- Final Agenda
- Educational presentations and handouts
- Slides used during council wrap-up session
Learning to Navigate Free vs. Fee
If I’ve learned anything in nearly two years of studying government and legal information, it’s that there are two sides to the same coin. The first side is found in federal depository libraries, in endless rows of Serial Sets and Statutes-at-Large. It’s found at GPO Access and more recently at FDsys, and that’s if you’re lucky and your research requires federal materials, since state government information gets even murkier. The second side of government information is under lock and key through online databases like Westlaw and Lexis, or in costly shelf sets like United States Code Annotated from West or the looseleaf services provided by CCH (now part of Wolters Kluwer). Through my excellent legal research and legal database classes at Pratt SILS, I predominantly worked the way a law librarian, or law school librarian, would work to access government information. I cut my teeth on these powerful, consumer-driven products that prided themselves on presenting the most authoritative, comprehensive, editorially superior resources for the modern law librarian. That is, the modern law librarian that can afford the astronomical price tag. I don’t regret my time inside this lock-and-key world. These resources, particularly the online tools from Westlaw and Lexis, taught me how to construct powerful and effective searches and how to separate the primary source content from their editorial embellishments. But now I am studying the same materials from the perspective of a very different librarian - someone who is likely not going to be doing legal research, but rather providing services and managing collections of free government documents either procured through the FDL program or through the online portals managed by GPO. This transition sometimes feels as though I’ve got the language and missed the dialect. I know the structure of government publications like the back of my hand, but finding it on the shelves can be an exercise in futility when these well-constructed publications are increasingly (and understandably) given up in exchange for online access. And finding it online through GPO Access, THOMAS or FDsys sometimes feels like I’m being asked to type with my hands tied behind my back. I have date restrictions that stop me from going further back than the mid-nineties, typically, and when I do find the legislation or regulation I’m looking for, I often have to go elsewhere to learn more about its current status. And the courts are a hodge-podge of accessibility on the web, particularly compared to the for-cost resources for federal district and appellate courts. Simply put, the materials available for free from the government aren’t as immediately accessible digitally as those made available by commercial vendors. But perhaps that’s not as dire as it sounds - perhaps I just did myself a disservice by starting with the commercial products, when in fact they serve two very different patrons. The issues of access and answers are important ones for government documents librarians, I sense from my course work. Their patrons aren’t the lawyers who pay for commercial content from vendors like West. Their patrons are resolving personal issues, perhaps agency regulations that affect their business, or they are students doing coursework that requires a familiarity with a particular piece of legislation, or they’re researchers who need the statistical data that the government publishes. Do they need it the day after it’s published, or replete with annotations that explain its legislative history or precedent value? Not necessarily. I’m learning that it’s more important that those patrons have a free, reliable resource for the government materials they crucially need, serviced by librarians who understand the value of collection preservation and long-term access. For these patrons, it seems less important that the information is attractively packaged with sophisticated search capacities. I’m glad I’ve been able to do my coursework from both sides of the government information coin - the side for the few, and the side for the many. I am perhaps hindered from time to time in my research strategies as I adjust to the world of depository government information, but I’m balancing this with an appreciation of just how important that makes the guardians and disseminators in the FDLP. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras, Pratt SILS Continue reading
“It can’t happen here”
November 18, 2010 / Leave a comment
Those who are not yet convinced that we need digital deposit of government information into Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) libraries, should read this:
- Could the Smithsonian No Longer Be Free?, by Stephanie Condon, CBS News, (November 11, 2010).
The draft proposal [of President Obama's bipartisan deficit commission], penned by commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, suggests a number of ways to cut discretionary spending by more than $200 billion in 2015 -- including reducing federal funding for the Smithsonian and the National Park Service. The commission co-chairs suggest the Smithsonian Institution should charge admission fees at its 19 museums and the National Zoo, which are all currently free, to make up for the lost funding.
And the response by the Smithsonian: Imagine that! An institution with a long history of free public access to our heritage being suddenly told, "Sorry, but we just can't afford to keep access free anymore -- even if the public has already paid for it." We have been told over and over that GPO has good intentions, and we fully believe that they do -- today. They don't want to charge for government information. They do want to make everything available freely for ever. But GPO does not set its budget. Good intentions are not sufficient to guarantee preservation and access in the digital age. None of this will be new to regular readers of FGI. What is new is that it is becoming increasingly hard for those who say we do not need digital deposit to justifiably claim the it-can't-happen-here argument. That is the argument that claims that a single repository or even a "a small number of dedicated preservation entities" will be sufficient to guarantee long-term, free, public access. My work over the last two years has concentrated on evaluating digital repositories using OAIS and TRAC and I have learned and re-learned a lot of lessons from this work. One lesson is that the one immutable, undeniable thing about digital information is that preservation will not happen by accident. It requires constant attention and intention. Another lesson is that there is too much important information to rely on a select few organizations to preserve it all. It's not just about keeping "lots of copies" (though that is an important piece of the puzzle). It is also about lots of communities and lots of decision makers and lots of budgets. The big mega-repositories, no matter how big or how well-intentioned, will not preserve (will not be able to afford to preserve) everything. And, inevitably, some of the things they weed, or choose not to select, or are forbidden by policy from collecting, will be valuable to someone. Those "someones" need their community libraries looking out for their needs. (And in the digital age, "community" no longer has to mean local, geographically-bound communities. In the digital age we can have world-wide communities of interest, discipline, subject, etc.) Another lesson is the importance of non-technological sustainability. When we look at long-term preservation, we have to look at risk of loss. Everyone knows that digital information is fragile and needs attention to ensure it remains usable. This fact is what drives the technological end of digital preservation projects. But there are also economic risks (not having enough money), organizational risks (changing priorities, changing missions), and social risks (being sure we select materials for preservation and do not withdraw that don't get "enough" use or generate "cost recovery"). Even GPO's first electronic transition plan explicitly guaranteed preservation only "as long as usage warrants." And every risk has an associated impact. If a failure happens, there is an impact. It could mean a new cost to recover or reformat or retrieve damaged or unreadable information. The worst impact is irretrievable loss of information. In between there are other impacts. In the world of government information these include privatization, imposition of fees, and imposition of restrictions on access or use or re-use. We see these every day (e.g., NTIS, STAT-USA, FBIS, PACER, Public Health Reports, the electronic LCSH, Current Industrial Reports, Schizophrenia Bulletin, and less access in general). A risk can be small or rare or unpredictable but the consequences or impact can be catastrophic. This is what happened with the financial industry. The financial 'quants' used (bad) data and (flawed) economic models to predict that a failure of the system was very, very unlikely. They decided that it was so unlikely that they didn't need to account for it. By failing to specify the impact of a failure and failing to have a plan for dealing with it, they gave us a recession, foreclosures, unemployment, record deficits, and near complete economic collapse. This was their version of "it can't happen here." Apart from the technical risks and impacts that are typically discussed in the digital preservation literature, the non-technological risks are at least as important, if not more so. "Surely, no one would privatize FDSys? Surely, Congress will always fund GPO adequately? Surely, the private sector won't challenge any special deals that Portico or other GPO 'partners' Surely, It Can't Happen Here?" With the attack on the Smithsonian, we know it is already happening here. David Rosenthal, who has written extensively about the technical aspects of digital preservation, has a excellent piece on related issues: The Anonymity of Crowds. Related FGI posts: Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program Government Documents at the Crossroads GPO's Budget and Priorities The State of FDsys and the Future of the FDLP Continue reading →Continue Reading →