Federal Depository Library Conference

October 22-25, 2006

NOTE: GPO has published the proceedings of this conference. This proceedings page includes links to most of the presentations. GPO also will be making audio from the Council session (and possibly others) available eventually. Since PDFs from most of the presentation have been made so speedily available, our summaries below contain simply a list of high points from the sessions we attended, with an emphasis on points not covered by the proceedings, such as discussion items from the Open Forums.

GPO • GPO Ops Open Forums

Highlights

These are the sessions we attended that we thought were the best:

• Library blogs (Kathy was inspired by this presentation to sign up to contribute to the Blume Library's new blog)
• Census Data on Hispanics
• Promoting Government Resources to K-12 (this would be a good workshop topic, we should keep it in mind)
• DDM2 (creation of a regional union list using DDM was discussed in the presentation; this might be something we should look into)
• Council discussion on digital deposit (the questions outlined in the handout are very provocative and worth going over)
• In addition, Rita found the New Attendees presentation useful, since it was her first conference

GPO

• NTIS electronic-only reports are going to be made available to Depositories, with cataloging, early next year.
• Bruce James believes Congress is reluctant to proceed with GPO's ambitious digitization plans. Partnerships with others who are digitizing (like Google) might be explored.
• Distribution backlog is caught up
• WAIS may soon be replaced (?)
• FDLP Desktop, Browse Topics being re-designed (the new Browse Topics site is here; they are looking for new contributors)
• A new online training tool is being tested—OPAL (Online Programming for All Libraries)
• FDSys (needs a new name) is progressing with first public release scheduled for some time next year
• Web harvesting pilot with EPA is completed; a full report will be out in late 2007
• GPO is at least considering the idea of digital deposit; this will not be a requirement for Depositories
• Authentication and version control issues are still being discussed a lot, and would impact any digital deposit scheme as well

GPO Operations Open Forums

• Item selection process will not be changed in the very near future; they will give us plenty of warning before it goes into effect
• Claims copies exhausted page needs updating and they say they will be taking care of that
• If a PURL leads to a list of publications instead of the particular title, that is an error; in these cases notify them via the help system
• If you have difficulties with separates or other shipments, contact GPO via the help system or Ms. McCaskill directly at jmccaskill@gpo.gov. If you have not gotten a separate shipment list two weeks after receiving the documents, let her know
• You can discard paper editions if a later version is available online
• GPO is still talking with the State Dept. about bound treaties; State does not have the money for producing these publications
• New features are coming from the Catalog of Government Publications—Z39 record sharing, federated searching, SDI services, holdings for periodicals, and enhanced New Electronic Titles options (this has already been announced on govdoc-l).

There were several interesting sessions that we did not attend, so we urge you to look through the proceedings with some care.

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