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Ric Davis Shares about FDLP at ALA Midwinter 2008
UPDATE 1/16/2008 - An alert reader who attended Ric Davis' speech wrote me to say that the speech was his prepared text and that there was more information about shared regionals than his speech text indicated.
If anyone else has observations, please make a comment. We welcome feedback and discussion.
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In a refreshing change from the mid 2000s, the Government Printing Office has already posted a speech given by Acting Superintendent of Documents Ric Davis at the 2008 Midwinter meeting of the American Library Association.
The speech can be found at http://www.fdlp.gov/file-repository/gpo-attended-events/lscm-director-speech-ala-midwinter/view.html and covers a variety of topics including GPO's Budget, the new FDLP desktop, web harvesting plans, current FDSys status and new marketing plans that sound like they will be developed in conjunction with depository libraries, at least in part. The whole 13 page, double-spaced speech is worth reading and I hope that at least some of you will have comments on it.
FGI tips its hat to Ric Davis for posting his ALA MW speech only a few days after it was given. It beats the months we've sometimes had to wait in the past.
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GPO and DLC: Thanks for Sharing
Recently, GPO released a sample of EPA documents that had been harvested from the EPA's website by software agents. These documents were gathered as a result of GPO's web harvesting project and a sample can now be found at: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/harvesting/index.html.
According to the EPA Web Harvesting page, documents are being made available in two ways:
The first method involves the creating of brief bibliographic records for the monographs and the CONSER standard record format for the serials. The majority of publications included in this sample will be made accessible through this method. Users may conduct a keyword search in the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) for the phrase “EPA pilot project” to review these cataloging records. The second method of access being tested involves posting a portion of the publications from the sample to GPO Access using a browse table. At the request of the Depository Library Council, LSCM is also trying to determine if there is a mechanism that enables public access to Web harvested content while these publications are in the queue for brief bibliographic records. LSCM has posted a small portion of the sample to GPO Access using a browse table.
If you want to see the full methodology and the documents available through the browse table, then please visit http://www.gpoaccess.gov/harvesting/index.html.
Regular readers of FGI know that we have problems with brief bibliographic records with no subject access, but we definitely appreciate GPO's efforts at item description and posting the browse table.
We are also very thankful to the Depository Library Council for requesting that the public be able to access harvested content while the publications are waiting for their brief records. We hope that GPO can find a way to accomodate their request as it will open up many possibilities for getting EPA publications in a timely yet searchable manner.
So thanks for sharing!
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Three Cheers for GPO: Tangible Copies of US Budget
I was very happy to hear that the Government Printing Office will be producing paper copies of the annual US Budget despite a White House announcement to go electronic only. Here is the GPO message sent out to FDLP-L today:
From: Announcements from the Federal Depository Library Program [mailto:GPO-FDLP-L@LISTSERV.ACCESS.GPO.GOV] On Behalf Of FDLP Listserv
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2008 12:03 PM
To: GPO-FDLP-L@LISTSERV.ACCESS.GPO.GOV
Subject: Tangible Copies of the Budget of the United States Government
On January 9, 2008, Office of Management and Budget Director Jim Nussle announced that the Budget of the United States Government would be released in a web-only format for Fiscal Year 2009 on February 4th, 2008. Mr. Nussle cited the cost savings of such a move as the reason for the discontinuance of paper copies of the Budget.
GPO wishes to assure the members of the Federal Depository Library Program that we are committed to keeping the various Budget publications in printed format. To this end, OMB has agreed to provide GPO with files of the Budget documents that will be put to press for the purpose of dissemination to the public through the FDLP and Publication & Information Sales Program. We intend to ship these tangible copies of the Budget in conjunction with the February 4th internet release.
The class numbers, titles, and item numbers involved in this announcement by OMB are:
PREX 2.8: Budget of the United States Government; 0853
PREX 2.8/1: Budget of the United States Government; 0853-C
PREX 2.8/5: Analytical Perspectives; 0855-B
PREX 2.8/7: Budget Revisions; 0853
PREX 2.8/8: Historical Tables, Budget of the United States
Government; 0853
If you have questions, please use the GPO online help service at:
<http://www.gpoaccess.gov/help>.
Why is this good news? For several reasons:
Preservation - At this point in time, tangible formats are the only absolutely proven way to ensure something will be readable 100 years from now. LOCKSS and other technologies may eventually change this, but certainly in digital preservation still belongs to the future. And folks in 2109 will want to know how our government spent its money in 2009.
Access - While electronic versions of documents like this are terrific for searching for a specific piece of information, they can be cumbersome to use. And for the 80,000,000+ Americans without internet access, a tangible format is the only access they'll have to the President's spending plans.
Privacy - With the United States called a pervasive surveillance society by Privacy International and other groups, the best way to avoid gov't and commercial scrutiny of your scrutiny of the US budget is by using the paper version. I still plan to use both print and electronic, but it's nice to have the choice in my hands.
I haven't asked GPO their reasons for continuing to print the US Budget in light of its migration to the Internet, but I am very glad they will be preserving this year's documents for future generations. Three Cheers!
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GPO’s FY 2008 Budget Request via CRS
Thanks to our friends at the Open House Project and Open CRS, we can bring the Congressional Research Service summary of GPO's FY 2008 budget request contained in the report:
RL34031
Legislative Branch: FY2008 Appropriations
June 05, 2007Government Printing Office (GPO). The agency’s FY2008 request of $181.98 million represents a 49% increase over the $122.1 million made available for FY2007. GPO’s budget authority is contained in three accounts: (1) congressional printing and binding, (2) Office of Superintendent of Documents (salaries and expenses), and (3) the revolving fund. FY2008 requests for these accounts are ! congressional printing and binding — $109.5 million; Office of Superintendent of Documents (salaries and expenses) — $45.6 million; and revolving fund — $26.8 million.
The congressional printing and binding account pays for expenses of printing and binding required for congressional use, and for statutorily authorized printing, binding, and distribution of government publications for specified recipients at no charge. Included within these publications are the Congressional Record; Congressional Directory; Senate and House Journals; memorial addresses of Members; nominations; U.S. Code and supplements; serial sets; publications printed without a document or report number, for example, laws and treaties; envelopes provided to Members of Congress for the mailing of documents; House and Senate business and committee calendars; bills, resolutions, and amendments; committee reports and prints; hearings; and other documents.
The Office of Superintendent of Documents account funds the mailing of government documents for Members of Congress and federal agencies, as statutorily authorized; the compilation of catalogs and indexes of government publications; and the cataloging, indexing, and distribution of government publications to the Federal Depository and International Exchange libraries, and to other individuals and entities, as authorized by law.
GPO requested $26.8 million for its revolving fund to support the agency’s acquisition of information technology infrastructure and security enhancements, workforce retraining and restructuring efforts, and facilities maintenance and repairs. This is an increase of $25.8 million over the $1 million provided in FY2007. Of the requested amount, $10.5 million was proposed for the completion of the development of GPO’s Future Digital System, while $9.4 million would cover the replacement of a 30-year-old automated composition system.20
Highlights of House and Senate Hearings on FY2008 Budget of the GPO.
Acting Public Printer William H. Turri, in his written testimony, discussed recent efforts to transform GPO’s operations for the digital age.21 GPO’s production of U.S. passports to meet new standards and increased demand has also been of
interest to appropriators.20 Testimony of William H. Turri, Acting Public Printer of the United States, U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch, Legislative Branch Appropriations for 2008, hearings, 110th Cong., 1st sess., March 16, 2007 (not yet published).
We at FGI would welcome any comments that GPO staff would want to post here, along with any other interested party's comments.
Continue readingGoogle Books/Fed Docs: Google Books Statistics–The Bigger Picture
Now that I had some statistics it dawned on me I had no idea whether or not this was a lot documents. So I was off to the FDLP desktop and the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications.
I looked around the desktop to see if GPO listed any statistics. On the "about" page for the CGP, GPO says merely that there are more than 500,000 records in the database. So I gave some thought to how I might get a better figure, and off I went to OCLC and the GPO database in FirstSearch. On the database info page, OCLC lists 507,000+ as the number of records and that the database had its last monthly update on August 8, 2007.
So I went back to the CGP and its advance search page. Searching for GPO in the publisher field is not terribly effective. Of course, in this database everything is a government document so that is not a problem.
But how to get a real number out of the database? I tried using the most common of words--a and the-- but to no great effect. A brings up 359,875 records and the brings up 411,493. Neither result comes close enough to the supposed 507,000.
I had another realization that the CGP now includes records for electronic titles--titles that would not be fodder for the Google Book Project. Using the New Electronic Titles page is not really an option to count them as it only goes back to April of 2005 and since early 2006 the monthly lists are not numbered (leaving me to do a lot of counting).
So back to the advanced searching page in the CGP. Happily here you can search for terms in the URL/PURL. I proceeded to search for every record that listed .gov, .mil, .us, .org, and .com. I came up with a total of 64,504 records. So approximately 13% of the records in the CGP are electronic titles or are titles with an electronic counterpart.
Unfortunately I had another realization that these figures really only represent documents published from 1976 on. This is a really big problem in that most of the documents I found in Google Books dated to before 1923. My only hope to get good numbers was to askGPO. So late on August 8th I shot off a query to GPO asking for statistics on the number of documents GPO has distributed both before and after 1976.
Surprisingly enough, GPO called me first thing the next morning. askGPO is notoriously slow in providing answers to queries so I was very surprised! I spoke with Nancy Faget at GPO and she was very pleasant though not exactly forthcoming with numbers. It struck me that I got the quick call back as GPO viewed my query as the first step in getting out of the program. As far as I know my director has no real intentions of doing that, but I don't think I convinced her on that point. But aside from that she told me that GPO really didn't know how many documents went to depositories since the beginning. Alas!!
I honestly don't know if would be fair to take the view that probably as much was distributed from 1813 to 1976 as was published after 1976. But if you did, that would lead to believe that over one million documents have been produced.
So the bigger picture suggests that the 167,878 titles in Google Books is only about 17% of all the documents that could be digitized. At a guess...
So I put a call out to everyone in GovDoc Land. If you are a full depository and have been one since 1813 and have kept really good records, could you please send me the statistics? Thank you very kindly in advance!
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