ADMINISTRATIVE NOTES Newsletter of the Federal Depository Library Program --------------------------------------------------------------------- August 15, 1999 GP 3.16/3-2:20/13 (Vol. 20, no. 13) --------------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE ON GOVERNMENT INFORMATION DISSEMINATION PROGRAMS Remarks by Francis J. Buckley, Jr. Superintendent of Documents Before the Federal Documents Task Force Government Documents Round Table American Library Association New Orleans, LA June 26, 1999 Greetings! I'm pleased to be here with such a large group of friends and colleagues to provide an update on the Superintendent of Documents government information dissemination programs. I'll touch on a number of issues, but other GPO staff will be sharing additional reports with you today and tomorrow and interacting in various committee meetings. Personnel To start, I would like to highlight some important personnel changes that have occurred since I last spoke to you in Philadelphia. Sheila McGarr has been appointed to serve as Chief of the Library Division. Many of you know Sheila through her recent responsibilities, which have included organizing both the annual Federal Depository Conferences and the Interagency Depository Seminars in addition to supervising our team of library inspectors. Others of you, no doubt, met her when she served as a library inspector in the early to mid 1980's. I'm sure you'll want to wish Sheila well in this position. George Barnum from Case Western Reserve University will be completing a two year stint as a member of the Electronic Transition Staff (ETS) in mid-July. I would like to take this opportunity to thank George for his diligent efforts on behalf of the depository program and especially for his work on Managing the FDLP Electronic Collection: A Policy and Planning Document, that was released last October. Our other ETS member, Judy Andrews, from James Madison University has been reappointed for a second year. She will continue examining and evaluating electronic products for inclusion in the Electronic Collection. We have asked Steve Kerchoff from the Library of Congress' Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC) to join ETS for the coming year. There are, however, some procedural issues that need to be ironed out before we can bring him on board. Steve would bring a great deal of knowledge about Federal libraries and information resources and would be able to make a major contribution to the program. In addition, Sheila asked me to let you know that Library Programs Service (LPS) is seeking another library inspector. The job announcement can be found on the GPO and Office of Personnel Management Web sites and has also been posted on GOVDOC-L and LAWLIB. If you have specific questions about the position, feel free to check with Sheila or Gil Baldwin here at the conference. As many of you have heard, an Electronic Collection Manager is being sought within LPS. Applications for that position were due to GPO in mid-June. Advertised nationally, we expect to have a selection made later this year. The establishment of this position is an action item in our electronic collection plan and we are pleased to see this idea on the way to becoming a reality. What are all these people and the rest of the staff doing? Why are they needed? Well, we're moving ahead on many fronts to make government information products available and as readily accessible as possible to all. We're collecting, cataloging, classifying, distributing, providing training, support, and outreach. None of these processes is simple or easy. But we are accomplishing a lot in all these areas. LPS Highlights There are reports on various activities in Library Programs Service in the handout. I'd like to highlight some of the issues and supplement the report with comments on additional programs and projects. Those of you in depository libraries will know that we are fairly consistent with last year, at this same time, in distribution of materials. We do, however, continue to see a drop in the number of tangible publications as GPO and Federal agencies make the transition to a more electronic environment. At the end of May '98, we had distributed more than 8,400 paper titles; as of May '99, that number was down over 1,000 to 7,300. CD-ROM distribution has decreased somewhat from close to 570 a year ago to 430 at the end of May, and microfiche titles are up from approximately 17,000 to close to 18,000. We are currently sending approximately 19 percent paper; 45% microfiche and 35% online. CD-ROMs constitute a little over 1% in distribution. We have begun distribution of National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) maps directly from GPO to regularize that process. In addition, LPS staff went to Denver to meet with staff from the U.S. Geological Survey in order to improve their map distribution. We are working actively to capture publications in all formats for the FDLP and Sales Program. In the Depository Administration Branch update, Robin Haun-Mohamed comments on the process for follow-up on reports of fugitive documents. She also mentions the Inspector General audit of the publications program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH Research Institutes have a statutory waiver from printing through GPO, but not from depository library or cataloging and indexing requirements. 78% of the sampled publications which should have been provided to the FDLP were not. We plan to call this report to the attention of other agencies to encourage greater compliance. Outreach and Training I'd like to comment on our more active program of outreach and training. Of course we are continuing our program of inspection visits, which have a heavy consultative component. In the last 6 months, there have been 53 library inspections in a number of states, including Texas, Kentucky and Missouri. In addition, the inspection staff completed 117 self-study evaluations. Since January, we have exhibited at a variety of conferences: ALA Midwinter, Computers in Libraries in Arlington, VA, the American Bar Association Technology Show in Chicago, the Association of College and Research Libraries in Detroit, the National Online Meeting in New York and the Special Libraries Association, a few weeks ago, in Minneapolis. We are planning now for next year's schedule and we would like to reach out to additional user groups. Staff from the Office of Electronic Information Dissemination Services (EIDS) have conducted 11 GPO Access training sessions and demos in 6 cities: Washington, DC., Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis and Bozeman, MT. And there is training scheduled for this coming Wednesday, June 30 at Tulane University. Personally, I have been on the road doing presentations about the program to various library groups in Michigan, at the University of Maryland, and the at Department of Energy in Oak Ridge, TN. Most recently, actually early last week, I traveled to Montana where I had the pleasure of appearing on a panel with Julie Wallace, from the University of Minnesota, at the Montana Library and the Mountain Plains Library Associations annual meeting. We discussed government information from perspectives inside and outside the Beltway. Back inside the Beltway, I've spoken to the District of Columbia Library Association, the DC Chapter of the Special Libraries Association, the Federal Publishers Committee and the Interagency Council on Printing and Publishing. An example of the networking benefits from these meetings was a contact with the Printing Officer from the Department of State from whom I learned of their plans to discontinue publishing the Background Notes on Countries of the World. They were planning only to put them on the Internet and were going to suggest that the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) reprint them on demand. I explained that we had the capability and desire to do that for items in demand in hard copy for the GPO Sales Program. As a result, we have developed an Interagency Agreement to download and print official copies of the Background Notes for both the Sales and Depository programs. In the last month I've had meetings with Ron Lawson, Director of NTIS, and Gary Bachula, Acting Undersecretary of the Department of Commerce for Technology Administration in order to discuss the role and relationships between GPO and NTIS. Thus far those discussions have been on a general, philosophical level in which I've been articulating public access concerns. I've used the NTIS/Northern Light Technology fee-based gov.search service proposal and the NTIS fee-based bibliographic database and report collection as examples of problems. My personal perspective is that the gov.search service was presented inappropriately and incorrectly as "the most comprehensive, useful, powerful, and incisive way to locate government information." They claimed that the new Web site would provide one-stop shopping for all federal government resources. In reality, this should have been marketed as an added-value fee-based service with enhanced searching capabilities, complementing many other sites for access to government information. And, in fact, it does not index all federal Web sites since a number, including GPO Access, do not permit Web-crawling robots which slow response times, into their sites. As I said to Mr. Lawson and Mr. Bachula, we need to coordinate, cooperate, and communicate more, and present a complete picture of the various systems of free and fee-based access to electronic government information to users. In addition, the NTIS bibliographic database should be provided for free public access at depository libraries. Furthermore, depository libraries should have access to the fugitive documents in the NTIS collection. Electronic Collection In regard to our own electronic information services, we were quite pleased that the policy and planning document that will guide the Federal Depository Library Program Electronic Collection was named to the list of "Notable Government Documents" for 1998. The article in the May 15 issue of Library Journal notes that "we are fortunate to have (the) Policy and Planning Document as one of our selections this year. It puts the (depository) program in context and clarifies its commitments..." The author goes on to say that: "It is a valuable tool for librarians facing collection of and service decisions for electronic products." In furtherance of the permanent public access recommendations in the plan, Gil Baldwin, Don Ladd, GPO Production Manager, and I have just had a meeting with Dr. Lew Bellardo, Deputy Director of the National Archives and Records Administration, to discuss cooperative endeavors, and we will soon be expanding those discussions to encompass representatives of national libraries, federal agencies, and others. GPO Access In that same Notable Government Documents article there were some very kind words about our Web site: "GPO Access is the veritable yellow brick road to official electronic information, making available online some 140,000 titles in plain text and PDF if possible. Over two-thirds of the titles are on GPO servers and the other third are linked sites. Downloading statistics are in the tens of thousands." The author goes on to say that "GPO Access is promoted by training nationwide and at depository libraries and also by the Access User Support Team (yes, real people)." T.C. Evans will talk about GPO Access in more detail shortly. Sales Program I must mention the GPO Sales Program, where there is much happening due to changing government publishing practices, both in quantity and format, changing customer purchasing patterns, and increasing competition for products and markets from other government sales programs and the private sector. The fact that we and other government agencies put some of the sales publications on the Web for free access, including our traditional best sellers such as the Federal Register, Congressional Record, Code of Federal Regulations and Commerce Business Daily, is undercutting the market, especially for people who have only occasional reference use of the publications. In addition we are seeing even more republishing of government information products by the private sector. By law GPO is required to make its printing plates, negatives or tapes available for purchase by private publishers at cost to encourage the further dissemination and reuse of government information. We are experiencing a 16% decline in orders and a decrease of over 20% in the number of individual publications and subscription copies sold. As a result our prices will be increasing to recover expenses. Having said that, let me tell you about a few new popular interest titles in the program that illustrate the efforts we are undertaking in the sales program: Microsoft Antitrust Materials -- At the request of the Justice Department and the court, we are publishing the depositions taken in the Microsoft antitrust case on CD-ROM for $52. In addition, they will be available in print on demand and on videotape. The Cox Report -- This report on Chinese intelligence activities and American nuclear secrets was so popular we sold out of our initial printing. We are reprinting in black and white rather than the original 4-color process to control costs, to ensure that this important document is available for sale. NIMH Publications -- Two new publications from the National institute of Mental Health; a booklet on schizophrenia and Science on Our Minds, a kit containing brief articles on various mental health topics are both being purchased directly from NIMH's printers for the Sales Program at NIMH's request. NOAA Diving Manual -- The GPO Sales Program will purchase a limited number of this publication from NTIS. NTIS, NOAA and Best Publishers, a private firm, are publishing the Manual as a joint venture. Federal Aviation Regulations -- To provide their continued availability in print, Sales will assume the copy preparation and printing costs for 20 Federal Aviation Regulations subscriptions in cooperation with the FAA, which was discontinuing printing as an economy move and planned to rely only on Internet access. We've implemented our program for retention of Government Information Products of Historical Significance in the Sales Collection. Currently, there are close to 530 publications declared historical in content. The Sales Management staff will continue to review the current sales inventory to identify publications of long-term historical significance to add to this existing list. We've had input from members of the Depository Library Council and depository librarians in the development of the policy and procedures as well as the initial list of appropriate publications. I want to briefly report that the Integrated Processing System -- IPS -- is well along in terms of software readiness. We are in the process of obtaining printing software in order to produce mailing labels. Staff is also in the final stages of resolving functional issues with our contractor, Northrup Grumman. In other words, we want to ensure that they provide what they are supposed to under terms of the contract and that everything works the way it is supposed to before we go live, hopefully at the end of the summer. Conclusion I'd like to conclude by saying this is an exciting time to be at GPO as we develop and evolve our systems to ensure permanent public access to as comprehensive a collection of government information products in all formats as possible. We have a number of staff here who can listen to your ideas and concerns. Many of them will be at GODORT sponsored programs over the next few days. You can also track some of them down at our booth in the exhibit hall. Please come see us!