Federal Depository Library Conference, October, 2005

GPO News and Updates

GPO Operations Update

This information sharing discussion is always worthwhile and I always pick up good tips here on day-to-day operational issues. Some tidbits learned this time:

• No more non-Congressional MF is being distributed, but Congressional fiche is continuing
• GPO is working on CD-ROM format migration, first converting titles that do not have online equivalents
• They are awaiting approval on a pre-1976 cataloging project, which will make records available by batch or FTP; they are taking prioritization suggestions
• The new ILS catalog ( Franklin ) will include brief records with URLs when these are known
• They have been working on collecting material for their proposed National Collection (of last resort) in advance of actual Joint Committee on Printing approval (JCP approval is pending on many of their current projects; since they are changing how they do business so fundamentally there are legislative changes involved). KA

GPO Demos

Authentication. This presentation gave more details about GPO's authentication system. Right now they are manually authenticating documents, but they hope to have an automated system going before too long. One thing I learned in this session is that you have to enable pop-ups to see the authentication information, and you also have to have a somewhat advanced version of the Acrobat reader, but it works fine on the one that we have. GPO is starting out with text documents, but acknowledges that other kinds of files—tables, GIS data, programs, images—also need to be authenticated and these will be much harder to handle. KA

Disaster Recovery (Backup) site. In a wonderful example of how wacky it must be to work for the government, the GPO folks are very excited about their backup system because it will work so much better than the current WAIS-based search system. For some reason they couldn't just upgrade the current system, but once the backup is working properly (hopefully in early spring, 2006) it will take over as the main system until the new FDsys is up. The advantages of the backup system were demonstrated: better search results, longer titles displayed, longer and more extracts for more precise searching, and of course, faster response time. KA

Franklin (catalog). The demo part of this presentation didn't work because they did some indexing of the database the day before and everything was fouled up. But we got a good preview of this catalog, which will take the place of the Catalog of Government Publications (which in turn took the place of the Monthly Catalog). It is the public end of GPO's new ILS which has been in the works for years but is hopefully almost ready to go “live.” When it finally does come online there will be the potential for some great things with it, including the pushing of catalog records to depositories. No doubt this will not work as smoothly as getting the records from Marcive, but it would certainly be a savings. That is a decision we will probably have to make some time in the next year if the GPO system comes up as expected. KA

GPO Tidbits

• GPO had it narrowed down to two vendors for software to do the harvesting of Agency Web sites for the electronic collection, but they were notified by procurement that the time for selecting had elapsed and now they have to start the RFP process over again
• FDsys will not be released in a “Big Bang” way, which usually does not work well but rather in an incremental approach that will be a series of releases, each of which will build or add capabilities into the system. R1 will deal with harvesting, deposit (of born digital), and conversion (of legacy material). It will also create infrastructure. R1A will deal with Access and Delivery. R2 will deal with extended capabilities. Need for flexibility in the FDsys was stressed. GPO expects to be dealing with sound and video as well as text with the Fdsys.
• The “Program Office” for the system will be contact point for supplier community. They are looking for a “Master Integrator” who will be like a General Contractor and hire sub contractors.
• GPO announced an aggressive schedule for getting the system up and running, but noted that their needs are not unique to GPO and that vendors have experience in building this type of system.
• The backup “disaster recovery” site with Akami is just beginning to be brought up. FDsys will eventually replace it. MK

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