Tag Archives: Registry

This is big news indeed. According to a press release, HathiTrust’s Federal Documents Registry — pulled together from the records of over 40 libraries — is now available as a beta release! Mike Furlough and Valerie Glenn gave a very good presentation of the project, methodology, etc. at IFLA last week.

A HUGE thanks to HathiTrust and especially to Valerie Glenn who took on this immense project. Hopefully, it’ll not only help HathiTrust identify materials not yet digitized in its corpus, but also the 1100+ depository libraries and public information users. Hopefully the FDLP will be able to use the registry to put together a union list and holdings of all documents in order to further FDLP’s goal of preservation of all historic FDLP documents. I know I’ll be using the registry to compare Stanford Library’s federal documents collection to the registry in order to find and fill gaps in our collections and also hopefully as copy for documents not yet cataloged.

The Registry is intended to be a comprehensive source of metadata for the US federal documents corpus – material produced at government expense since 1789. While many potential use cases exist, an important use will be the identification of materials that have not yet been digitized and/or deposited into the HathiTrust repository.The Registry was conceived in 2012 as a mechanism to determine how far  HathiTrust had progressed in meeting its goal of a comprehensive digital corpus, as outlined in the ballot initiative from the 2011 Constitutional Convention. In the fall of 2013, we issued a broad call for records, and thanks to the more than 40 libraries who responded we received  more than 25 million records. With such a large aggregation of records, the project team needed to develop multiple approaches for detecting and grouping duplicate records (records describing the same work).

via Federal Documents Registry Progresses to Beta | HathiTrust Digital Library.