Judith C. Russell
Managing Director, Information
Dissemination (Superintendent of Documents)
U.S. Government
Printing Office
Building 3, Room
C801
732 North
Capitol Street N.W.
Washington,
D.C. 20401
Dear
Ms. Russell,
Thank
you for the opportunity to comment on the discussion draft of “Managing the
FDLP Electronic Collection (EC).” It is essential to revise this document to
reflect both new and evolving policies that have emerged in managing the EC
over the past six years. The American
Library Association’s Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) commends the
Government Printing Office (GPO) for updating this important document. Below
are some specific suggestions for further improvements to this initiative.
A
lack of clear distinction between existing GPO practice and those policies and
functions that remain in the planning stage, is one overall concern GODORT has
with the planning document. An
additional report, assessing GPO's current compliance with the EC plan, would
provide the community with more assurance that digital content is currently
being preserved as improved processes are developed.
We
support the authentication of government information by GPO [Key Assumption #6]
as discussed in section VI, “Official Status of EC Content.” It is wise to anticipate varying levels of
authenticity, while ensuring that information is neither withdrawn from or
never enters the Electronic Collection solely because it does not meet certain
standards.
We are encouraged that GPO recognizes
the importance of deploying multiple strategies to identify content for the EC.
Given the diverse and uncoordinated nature of many federal agency Internet
publication programs, reliance on notification and outreach with the depository
community and federal agencies, while important, cannot be the only one avenue
for identifying appropriate content. GPO must be aggressive in employing
proactive strategies such as Web harvesting to assure all appropriate content
is identified. GPO must also allocate sufficient staff resources to ensure that
the large volume of information identified by web harvesting can be adequately
evaluated and brought under bibliographic control.
The
capture of appropriate copies for the GPO archive is an important aspect of the
acquisition of publications for the EC. While GPO's current process seems to
work well with static, monographic publications, it is unclear that
publications issued serially or updated on an ongoing basis are being captured
in their entirety and at regular intervals. After multiple issues of a
newsletter are identified, cataloged, and captured by GPO, for example, is
further effort made to return to the site to capture new issues as they are
published? More detailed information
about GPO's procedures for capturing serial and continuously updated
publications is needed.
We are pleased that GPO recognizes
the importance of assuring ongoing access to the publications within the EC.
Section IX states that the digital copies in the GPO archive will be made available
when the publication is no longer available at the publishing agency site. The
dynamic nature of federal agency web sites makes the activity of tracking the
availability of specific publications a difficult and labor-intensive task.
Well-developed procedures and sufficient resources are absolutely essential to
the success of this activity. We urge GPO to further explain its procedures and
plans for resource allocation to accomplish the goals of assuring ongoing
access to EC publications.
GODORT
is encouraged by GPO acknowledgment of the government's obligation to preserve
electronic information. We are concerned, however, about GPO’s specific plans
for the preservation of digital materials, especially in light of the delay in
establishing a mirror site for GPO Access. We are pleased to see language that
emphasizes the necessity of establishing geographically separate locations
included in the document; this language needs to be manifest in physical
reality. More information about the anticipated responsibilities
of FDLP partner sites is also needed.
GODORT
appreciates the opportunity to comment on this revised edition of the ‘Managing
the FDLP Electronic Collection’ document.
We recognize the challenge in identifying, acquiring, providing access
to, and preserving electronic information and affirm our commitment to work
with GPO in revising this document to incorporate new and update existing
policies
Sincerely,
John A. Stevenson
Chair, Government Documents Round Table
Coordinator, Government Documents and Maps Processing Unit
University of Delaware Library
181 S. College Ave.
Newark, DE 19717-5267