Managing an integrated depository documents collection

This section presents techniques, practices and specific strategies by which documents collections can be made more effective. It also highlights individual documents collections and addresses issues pertinent to forthcoming government policies and regulations.Many law libraries have become selective depository libraries under provision of Public Law 95–261 passed on April 17, 1978. The Law Library at Southern Illinois University is one such selective depository library. The decision about whether to integrate or separate documents is usually based on the local situation, and the decision of this library to integrate depository documents into the collection was made after reviewing local library factors. This article describes the practices of managing an integrated documents collection including technical processing of paper and microfiche documents, collection development and maintenance, and reference service.     

Government Publications for School and Small Public Libraries

Because of inadequate funding, school and small public libraries have special needs when building their collections. They may wish to acquire federal government documents because these publications are frequently free or inexpensive as well as being authoritative and visually attractive. This article gives examples of government publications and suggests ways in which they might be used in a library. It also outlines procedures for ordering documents. A list of all documents mentioned in the article with prices, publication dates, and order numbers appears at the end of the article.     

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Managing Government Document Collections in a Digital World

An Oregon State University Libraries (OSUL) study group's review of its current policies, practices, and costs provides an illustrative case study of the challenges in managing government documents during this period of transition from print to digital. In its exploration of more aggressive approaches to greatly increasing access to electronic collections and reducing the size of the print footprint, OSUL learned that the current requirements of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) hamper such efforts. This case study provides background on prior internal studies, OSUL's participation in a shared housing agreement, statistics on size and current usage of its government documents, and the costs to receive, process, and provide access to its document collection. It concludes with the recommendations for OSUL to be as proactive as it can be under the current FDLP rules and regulations while bringing projected costs to manage government documents more in line with higher priorities.     

Effective instruction needed to improve students' use of government documents

Findings from an analysis of printer data in the Walter Stiern Library at California State University, Bakersfield (CSUB), revealed that government documents accounted for about 5% of the total materials printed. A comparison of these findings with circulation statistics for government documents showed that students are more likely to print web-based government documents than to check out their paper counterparts. However, neither paper nor electronic government documents were accessed at levels indicating extensive use. This study indicates that students are neglecting important materials in their research and that instructors need to further incorporate the use of government documents into their course requirements. Collaborative instruction between librarians and teaching faculty can promote access to the rapidly developing digital collections of government documents.     

Old solutions in a new age: Cataloging and the future of access to government information

The availability of U.S. Government Printing Office bibliographic tapes for copy cataloging or for loading directly into online catalogs may have lulled documents librarians into believing that the problem of bibliographic control for documents collections has been solved. Others may believe that with the move to an electronic distribution system for United States government information, creating and loading bibliographic records for government publications into local library catalogs is becoming an anachronism. This article discusses the functions of cataloging in light of continuing needs and current developments in access to government information. Recommendations are made for ways that the library community, providers of government information, and automation specialists can work together to reexamine bibliographic standards, expand tape loading to non-U.S. depository documents collections, link useful bibliographic databases with library catalogs, and use cataloging of Internet resources to show relationships between physical collections and remotely accessible government information.     

Grant Writing Information in Federal Depository Collections

Federal government documents collections are a rich source of information about grant writing. This article describes the establishment and ultimate demise of the college's grants office and subsequent efforts to serve the grant writing information needs of faculty and reference librarians. The bibliography lists federal documents by broad subjects and, under each, by government agency.     

Documents librarianship II: Current and future direction of automation activities for U.S. government depository collections

This article reviews the current status of government documents automation and identifies major problems associated with documents automation. These serve as background for a proposed research agenda concerned with the development and implementation of a broad-based documents control system. The proposed agenda, if implemented, would result in the design of full-function, automated documents systems, suitable for depository library collections.     

REGNET: Regulatory information management,compliance and analysis

This paper provides an overview of a research effort that aims to investigate methodologies and tools to facilitate access, compliance and analysis of government regulations. The complexity, diversity, and volume of government regulations are detrimental to business and hinder public understanding of government. The burden of complying with regulations can fall disproportionately on small businesses since these businesses may not have the expertise or resources to keep track of the regulations and the requirements. Regulations emanating from different agencies, each has its own objectives and scopes of concerns, may overlap on similar and related issues and may have inconsistency. The situation can potentially be improved by developing appropriate methodologies and tools that can help facilitate the development and analysis of regulatory documents as well as compliance process. To illustrate, this paper discusses the applications of information technology for selected services related to regulations, such as compliance assistance and comparison of regulations.     

The use of government publications: The case of social scientists at the university of botswana

The authors surveyed 101 social scientists at the University of Botswana to determine their use of government publications. Citation studies were also employed as a complement to the survey. The findings reveal that most of the respondents (97.3 percent) used government documents in some fashion. Moreover, most users attached a high importance to the use of government publications for research (89 percent) and teaching (86 percent). The study also suggests that social scientists prefer to borrow government publications from their colleagues and obtain personal copies rather than depend on the University of Botswana Library. It is recommended that government documents be more accessible to the establishment of government publications distribution centers as the inaccessibility of these documents is a national problem. Another recommendation is that the University Library should provide current awareness services on government publications to its users.     

U.S. State Documents in Academic Libraries*

This article presents the results from a survey intended to determine how academic libraries in the United States manage and promote their state document collections. In November 1996, a six-part questionnaire (including general information; coordination of state documents; selection and acquisition of state documents; location of and access to state documents; use of state documents; and electronic access to state documents) was distributed to 350 academic libraries including one flagship institution in each state and 300 institutions randomly selected from the Higher Education Directory, 1996. Two hundred seventy-seven libraries responded to the questionnaire, for a return rate of 79.1 percent. The answers to the survey indicate that about 54 percent of the respondents participate in a state document depository program, and less than 50 percent have a designated librarian coordinating state documents. State documents are acquired either through purchases or through the depository program, are circulated and integrated with the general collections, classified in accordance with the Library of Congress classification system, and accessed through the library Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). The librarians responding to the questionnaire perceived the use of state documents as limited.     

我国网络内容政策法规的文本分析

[目的/意义]描述并分析我国网络内容政策法规的基本信息和文本内容，了解其存在的问题和不足，与主要发达国家网络内容政策法规予以对比，给出相应解决办法，为我国网络内容治理提供法制保障。[方法/过程]在政府门户网站和政策法规专业数据库中搜索网络内容政策法规，经筛选，共得到有效样本202个。将所得数据导入Nvivo11，采用内容分析法从颁布时间、颁布主体、颁布形式三个角度对我国网络内容政策法规文本的基本信息予以探索，并从网络内容主体和网络内容客体两个维度对政策法规文本内容展开分析。同时，对政策法规颁布主体进行共词分析，采用社交网络分析法利用VOSviewer软件绘制政策法规颁布主体合作网络图。[结果/结论]研究发现我国网络内容政策法规存在颁布主体多元、立法层级低和政策法规内容科学性有待提升等问题，通过与主要发达国家网络内容政策法规的对比分析，建议从改革管理体制、加快重点领域立法、完善网络服务提供者相关规定、明确违法内容判定标准四个角度予以完善。     

Accessibility and Reference Use of the Depository Collection in College and University Libraries

This paper will first present a short history of the many issues involved in government documents librarianship over the years. It then will present an ovewiew of the most frequently used and requested sources of government information. It will by no means be an exhaustive list because it is aimed at the general information provider in an academic library. This general information provider may not be very familiar with federal documents and may even be afraid of them. In this world of rapidly advancing technology, documents can no longer be pushed aside or overlooked as a source of information because access has improved so much. In this overview, the many formats, including the electronic format in which many documents are now available, will also be noted. This electronic format has caused many problems to arise because of the lack of a federal information policy that is clearly defined.     

A survey of government document front-line employees: the road to service standards continues

In From Red Tape to Results, U.S. Vice President Albert Gore established a three-step process for creating service standards for federal agencies. This article presents the second step of this methodology, known as the front-line employee survey. The author administered this survey to staff of Oklahoma government document collections. The employee survey found that the Oklahoma government document employees are essentially satisfied with their positions; yet, improvement may be needed in services offered and in workplace facilities.     

Security and preservation of the U.S. congressional serial set

Librarians are becoming increasingly concerned about the safety and physical integrity of valuable government documents such as the U.S. Congressional Serial Set. Using a questionnaire to survey 187 government documents collections, the investigators (i) determine current library security practices with regard to the Serial Set, (ii) identify those volumes within the collection that are most likely to be vandalized or stolen, and (iii) make recommendations for the security and preservation of these items. The goal of the study is to give librarians a better awareness of security problems and possible solutions.     

Using Targeted Distributed Collections to Enhance Government Depository Collections at a Regional Level: The ASERL Collaborative Federal Depository Program

The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries is exploring options for collaborative services and collection analysis for federal government publications in order to improve public access to those collections. The Collaborative Federal Depository Program has developed “Centers of Excellence” (COE), representing multiple complete collections of publications for each federal agency. Working together to create a distributed print retention program, southeastern depository libraries agreed to collect, maintain, and provide access to publications for specific government agencies. The authors discuss the development of the COE model and the expected impact of a regionally based distributed print archive for government documents, and provide an implementation case study.     

Document retrieval on repetitive string collections

Most of the fastest-growing string collections today are repetitive, that is, most of the constituent documents are similar to many others. As these collections keep growing, a key approach to handling them is to exploit their repetitiveness, which can reduce their space usage by orders of magnitude. We study the problem of indexing repetitive string collections in order to perform efficient document retrieval operations on them. Document retrieval problems are routinely solved by search engines on large natural language collections, but the techniques are less developed on generic string collections. The case of repetitive string collections is even less understood, and there are very few existing solutions. We develop two novel ideas, interleaved LCPs and precomputed document lists, that yield highly compressed indexes solving the problem of document listing (find all the documents where a string appears), top-k document retrieval (find the k documents where a string appears most often), and document counting (count the number of documents where a string appears). We also show that a classical data structure supporting the latter query becomes highly compressible on repetitive data. Finally, we show how the tools we developed can be combined to solve ranked conjunctive and disjunctive multi-term queries under the simple \({\textsf{tf}}{\textsf{-}}{\textsf{idf}}\) model of relevance. We thoroughly evaluate the resulting techniques in various real-life repetitiveness scenarios, and recommend the best choices for each case.     

GPO recalls of depository documents A review

Since the very early 1980s, various government agencies have increasingly issued requests to depository libraries directly or through the Government Printing Office (GPO) to destroy or return certain distributed documents. This article cites recalled documents and explores the reasons for their recall. Most recalls fall into one of five problem categories: military security, administrative and operational security, falsified data, outright censorship, and environmental security. Specific reasons for recall are seldom given and must be inferred by examining specific titles. Librarians have shown little published interest in the subject of recalls, but an informal survey indicated general compliance with the recall requests. The GPO also has said little except to ask agencies to direct the recalls through the federal Depository Library Program. It is concluded that the GPO should take a more active role in reviewing agencies' requests, since many recall requests have been of doubtful value, and that government documents librarians should assess recalls on a case-by-case basis.     

A graphic look at GPO depository distribution: 1975–1993

The American Library Association Government Documents Round Table in the early 1980s prepared statistics guidelines for government documents collections. These guidelines suggested that a collection's federal publications be counted and reported in the same manner as similar materials that are nongovernmental. This paper demonstrates how statistics might be maintained on federal publications acquisitions and holdings to describe trends in GPO depository distribution. Such data included in annual reports may be graphically displayed for comparison over a number of years to show how trends in GPO depository distribution have affected budget and space needs.