Home » Posts tagged 'fugitive documents' (Page 8)
Tag Archives: fugitive documents
New Blogging Team for Lost Docs Blog
On behalf of Free Government Information (FGI), I am pleased to announce that a three member team of volunteers is taking over the posting and management of the Lost Docs Blog at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info. Your new maintainers are: Meredith Johnston - Self described independent scholar with an MLIS and a MA. GODORT member since 2007. Jeffrey Hartsell-Gundy - Government Information & Law Librarian of the Miami University Libraries. He blogs documents for the University at www.lib.muohio.edu/blog/71. John Cash - Catalog specialist at Wells Library, Indiana University with over 10 years worth of documents experience. We at FGI are pleased that these three documents community members are stepping forward to continue the process of illuminating the fugitive document submissions to GPO. How the blog works will remain the same. Keep sending your fugitive documents receipts from GPO to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info. I am still in the process of training the new team in posting, tagging and reporting on new fugitive reports. Thanks in advance for your continuing patience during this transition time. Continue reading
December 2010 Lost Docs Report and Appeal
REPORT In December 2010, we received and posted 39 reports to GPO from librarians reporting documents that had seemingly fallen through the cracks of the cataloging process. The reports were originally sent to GPO between October and December 2010. This month was a great one for cataloging lost documents. Of the 39 reported documents posted by us, 17 (44%) have been cataloged and in the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) as of this writing. See these records for yourself by visiting lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/found/ and looking at the postings with December 2010 dates. We are appreciative of these new records. From December, 16 items remain listed as "fugitive documents", with four others remain listed as "pending", where GPO has indicated an item will be cataloged, but no public record in the CGP is available. You can view the pending items lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/pending/ and looking at the postings with December 2010 dates. The fugitive items are available at http://lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/lost/. Two documents reported to GPO appeared to already have public CGP records and we classed them as "false positives." 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.
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.
September 2010 Lost Docs Report and Appeal
REPORT In September 2010, we posted 31 "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. How many reports did GPO receive? Only they know, but the more people who send their fugitive docs e-mail receipts to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info, the more accurate our count will be. Of the 31 reported items that were posted to the blog in September, seven 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 September 2010 dates. We are appreciative of these new records. Actually, if you view the list of "found" documents, you'll notice 12 entries, five of which are also marked "fugitive." In these five instances, we have been provided a note that GPO intends to catalog these items. However there was no publicly available record in the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) when we searched those titles. We will take the "fugitive" tag off those records if we're made aware of a CGP record In our view, eight of the items reported to GPO and posted to the blog in January were either out of scope for the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) or were already in the catalog. You can view these items by visiting lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/false/ and looking for items with March 2010 dates. Most of these "false positive" items relate to the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill and may reflect proactive activity on GPO's part to get any oil spill related documents. If so, we commend them. 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.
Latest Comments