GPO News
from the Fall, 2007, FDLC
An important chunk of GPO news involves the new FDLP desktop. There's a separate page with highlights of this important new tool.
General GPO News. The Keynote address was given by Bob Tapella, who was recently confirmed by the Senate as Public Printer. He stressed his commitment to free and open access to government documents. Rick Davis will continue as Acting Superintendent of Documents but has turned down the permanent position to remain as Director, Library Services & Content Management . Bob Tapella stated that GPO had finished the fiscal year in the black although the sales program is losing money. He urged depository librarians to read the draft of the new Handbook and sent in their comments. He also announced that there were 465 attendees registered for the conference. The record registration was 535. [RW]
FDSYS. The big, underlying, comprehensive system to take GPO's operation into the 21st century, has been called the "Future Digital System" since it was initiated a few years ago. The acronym was FDSys, which no one was particularly happy with. Now the acronym has been made the official name, with the "F" changed to "Federal." At least they didn't try to saddle the system with some cutesy name that wouldn't really indicate what it is.
Moving from the trivial to the substantive news on this front, their internal release 1B, which is the first real beta test version of the system, is now out. We were shown some of the screens in a plenary session demonstration, plus could look at it in more detail throughout the conference in one-on-one sessions with members of the GPO team. The system has some very interesting features, some of which concern us only in a somewhat abstract fashion, such as how agencies use it to submit publications that will end up in the Depository program. In other ways the system will impact our operations heavily when it's finally completely online. I was particularly impressed by the search features of the demonstration database. For knowledgeable users, it combines the best features of keyword searching and browsing. It should be easy to access metadata for all the information products in the system as well.
They are continuing to proceed in a very deliberate fashion, hoping to set up a system that will be flexible and useful for many years. The first public release of FDSys won't be until late next year, with additional features (such as "pushing" of records and/or documents) will come in 2009. For more information, see this website. [KA]
Technical Services Update. Laurie Hall gave a summary of what's going on in GPO's technical services unit. Here are the high points that are of particular interest to us: (some of these points were made in other presentations on these topics)
