April
2-5,
2006
Federal Depository Library Conference
April
2-5,
2006
The following miscellaneous announcements, statistics, etc., from GPO, are those I felt were most important to note:
The PURL referrals report function has been fixed, and new reports have been posted here.
Depository Manual chapters are being put up for comment; several have been posted here, and others will be posted as they are ready.
Next meeting dates have already been set: October 22-25, 2006, in Washington and April 15-18, 2007, in Denver
Essential titles list will be revised, hopefully before the June selection update period. This listing is of titles that will remain in paper distribution (as long as the issuing agencies continue to print them). There might be different listings for different types of libraries (law libraries might have their own list, for example). Some changes may be made based on selection rates; titles which are selected by a small number of libraries in print will be dropped from the list. An exception to this new policy would be Congressional publications (hearings, reports, documents). Congress wants those to continue to be available in print for depositories.
The digitization of GPO legacy collection (which is still being collected) will start in earnest soon. There have been some contributions of special groups of publications (bills, NASA reports, etc.) from some libraries. Cataloging records for these batches of publications will show up in monthly GPO cataloging record loads. GPO has a list of priorities for digitizing legacy documents. You can consult this listing to see what items might be coming up next. This page has links to the priorities list and also to GPO's registry of digitization projects at other institutions.
The FDLP Desktop will be re-designed soon. There was much agreement from GPO and librarians that it is not particularly easy to find things on the Desktop.
Only 8% of distributed documents in the past year were only tangible (mostly these were maps and items in "problem" formats). You can see other statistics in the GPO Update Handout.
