F e d e r a l D e p o s i t o r y L i b r a r y P r o g r a m ADMINISTRATIVE NOTES Newsletter of the Federal Depository Library Program ---------------------------------------------------------------------- November 15, 2000 GP 3.16/3-2:21/15 (Vol. 21, no. 15) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SPEED IT UP: LIFE IN INTERNET TIME Remarks by Gil Baldwin Director, Library Programs Service Before the Federal Depository Conference and Fall 2000 Meeting of the Depository Library Council Arlington, VA October 23, 2000 Good morning, everyone. It is my privilege to come before you today as we resume the annual Federal Depository Conference hosted by GPO. This is largest attendance ever for one of our events, and I am pleased that so many of you have been able to come, especially all of you first-time attendees and new Government information librarians here today. We're anticipating a great conference, and we will do everything we can to make this a positive experience. I'm going to keep my remarks shorter than usual this time (that's not an applause line, by the way) so rather than doing the standard "LPS Update," I just want to highlight a few critical topics and developments. For the operational items, I encourage you check out two handouts: the LPS Update and the Library Programs Service FY 2000 annual report. Recognition and Thanks Before I get too far along, though, there are a few people I'd like to give some special recognition to. First off, let me welcome the five new Council members: Charlene Cain, Cathy Hartman, Dena Hutto, Greta Marlatt, and John Stevenson. This is great new "class," and we look forward to working with each of you over the next three years. Next I'd like to announce two new partnerships that greatly enhance our array of services. Through the efforts of Ann Marie Sanders at the Library of Michigan, we now have a new set of Web pages specifically for the Regional depositories. These include information on the Regionals' role and the concerns specific to regional librarians. Ann worked very hard to shepherd this project through the approval process at her home institution, the Library of Michigan, and the results are very impressive. You can find a link to the Regionals page off the Partnerships page on the FDLP Desktop. The other announcement is a further outcome of our cataloging and locator services review of earlier this year. In that review, we recommended that the Browse Topics application be turned over completely to a partner who would manage and improve it, and coordinate the volunteer contributors. Shortly after the Council meeting in Newport we received an inquiry from Adriana Edwards-Johnson, the documents librarian at the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO) in Edmond, OK, about taking on that project. Although we still need to get signatures in place, we have completed an agreement on the terms of the partnership, and we hope to begin the transition over to UCO's management and servers in a few weeks. We're very grateful to both these librarians, and their administrators, for taking and supporting these initiatives to help move the program forward. Then there's the Library Programs Service staff. Would you all please stand so everyone can see you. I am very proud of the LPS staff. They really care about this program, and this year they have performed for you and the American public under very adverse and demoralizing conditions. They are doing their best with the resources available, in an environment where change is the only constant. LPS is committed to carrying this program's best traditions on into the next Millenium, and we pledge to continue to work with you to expand public access to Government information, whether that access is through print collections or the Web. You know, we at LPS stick with this program because we believe in the mission. After all, it's not like we don't have other opportunities. Just the other day, we got a message on askLPS that offered to sell us an Australian outback chicken farm; a going concern with birds and all. I also want to recognize Steve Kerchoff, who just finished a year with us as an electronic transition specialist. Steve, who has recently returned to his post at the Library of Congress, played a big role in developing Ben's Guide, worked on our partnerships and with the OCLC archiving project, and kept us honest about when the Millenium really starts. Thank you, Steve. Accelerating the Electronic Transition Let's move into the area now of program highlights. Acting on the clear direction from Congress, we are moving to a primarily electronic FDLP. Both the House and the Senate have told us to emphasize electronic dissemination. This was articulated in the Conference report [House report 106-796], which said "[e]mphasis should be on streamlining the distribution of traditional paper copies of publications which may include providing online access and less expensive electronic formats." For Fiscal Year 2001, which began on October 1, we were faced with some additional spending requirements, the largest of which is the $1.6 million for depository copies of the bound U.S. Code. A new compilation of the U.S. Code is issued in its entirety once every six years, and as one of the core titles in the Program, we are committed to keeping it available in paper format. But since we are also looking at the $2 million dollar funding cut, we must reduce expenses. LPS is therefore moving rapidly to reduce multiple format distribution in the FDLP by trimming the distribution of physical products. So not only have we been directed to go more electronic, but also we must reduce program spending to live within the appropriation. In the FDLP, two of the biggest expense categories are printing and shipping costs, so we must realize savings in those areas. We are searching for print products that are also available electronically and changing them to online dissemination. The program is simply not being funded at a level that permits us to continue to make dual format distribution on a routine basis. "Migrating" to Electronic Dissemination On the operational level, LPS is making daily acquisitions decisions that confirm the transition to a primarily electronic program. But this is not really news. These changes have been under way since 1996 when the transition began. GPO has been making the change to electronic access on a title-by-title basis for several years, but generally we proceeded in tandem with the publishing agencies as they embraced online publishing. Now LPS is actively searching the Web for online versions, and our analysis indicates that some 50% of the products that have been distributed in tangible format may also have an online version available. Several depository librarians conducting their own online searching projects have independently verified this level. As you can tell from the announcements in WEBTech Notes, many titles have already been migrated to electronic-only, and you will begin to see the results of these decisions in the coming months. By the end of August LPS had already established the requirements for depository copies for many products that will be printed under GPO term contracts beginning this Fiscal Year. LPS undertakes this review each year, and typically the quantity requested for the FDLP rises or falls only slightly. But this year, in order to save printing and shipping expenses, we checked each term contract to see if that title or set of products is available online. If it is, and it does not fall into one of the exception categories, LPS changed the depository dissemination to electronic only. Policy Statement on Electronic Dissemination We outlined the decision criteria for the migration and the various exception categories in the letter to the directors. Since then we have formalized this into a draft Superintendent of Documents policy statement. These "SODs," as we call them, are used within GPO to document policy and form the basis for detailed operating procedures. Some of you recall SOD-13, which contains the policies about distribution in microfiche. This is the modern-day equivalent and recognizes the significant changes in the FDLP. Our new draft, called "Dissemination/ Distribution Policy for the Federal Depository Library Program" is one of the available handouts, and was also posted to GOVDOC-L last week. Since I posted the draft, there have been a number of comments on it, both on the list, and directly to me. Among the comments are several recurrent themes, and I want to respond to these now. 1. Sales: Changes in the depository library distribution format do not affect whether the product is for sale by GPO. 2. Permanent access: We are archiving the products that are available only online, either here at GPO, or through a partnership. 3. Cataloging: LPS' highest cataloging priority are the electronic products in the FDLP. We will discuss the draft in the Council working session this afternoon from 3:50-5:00PM, and we look forward to refining this policy statement with your input. The key statement in the policy statement is that the primary dissemination medium for the FDLP is online electronic. Tangible products, meaning paper, microfiche, or CD-ROM will generally be furnished only when certain criteria or circumstances exist. This direction has already been established by the Congress and put into practice by LPS. Our discussion will focus on how this policy will be implemented to best serve the information needs of the public. Building the Electronic Collection through New Content Partnerships Moving toward the primarily electronic program depends upon building the FDLP Electronic Collection. The Electronic Collection must support permanent public access to the titles disseminated in online format. LPS has enjoyed a number of successes in building partnerships with depository libraries and publishing agencies which guarantee permanent access to parts of the Electronic Collection. But the time has come to explore ways for libraries to "collect" FDLP electronic resources that fit their collection development needs based on subject matter or originating agency or possibly other criteria, and then keep these resources available for permanent public access. In this kind of partnership, the library and GPO become FDLP dissemination partners. Of course permanent public access is a critical element of this distributed responsibility, and the partner library will be expected to agree to keep the online publications available indefinitely. In the event of some unforeseen circumstance that would impede public access to the content, the partner will turn the electronic files over to GPO for continuing access. We encourage any library that is interested in electronic collection building to contact us with specific ideas about what you might want to collect. Overall, we anticipate that such distributed responsibilities allow us to expand the coverage of the FDLP Electronic Collection. Cataloging and Locator Services As we move toward a primarily electronic Program, the operations within LPS are changing as well. LPS' traditional emphasis is shifting from acquiring and shipping physical products to managing an electronic collection for current and future public access. This collection management environment is new territory for LPS, and our toolset to deal with it is based on updated versions of several of our traditional functions: we identify, evaluate, select, organize, and catalog electronic Government information products, and assure that they remain permanently accessible to the public. These services are critical elements of our electronic collection management activities. In fact, the strategy of accessing distributed electronic resources is unworkable without cataloging and locator tools. We know that you expect more cataloging services from GPO, so we are renewing our efforts to bolster the cataloging staff in the coming years. But there's more to improving our cataloging services than expanding the number of staff. Systems Modernization Needs Over the past few months there have been numerous inquiries and comments about the various GPO Access cataloging and locator services. Many of these questions involve data integrity across disparate applications and outputs. There is a growing expectation among our users that our cataloging and locator services, as well as our administrative data services, like the List of Classes or WEBTechNotes, have totally consistent and complete data. Changes or additions to the data should ideally appear simultaneously in every output. These are good questions, and reflect reasonable customer expectations. However, I suspect that these expectations and inquiries are based in part on the use of state-of-the-art library systems and software. Unfortunately, LPS does not work in this kind of integrated system environment. Instead, our various representations of data are derived from a patchwork quilt of legacy applications, very few of which exchange data. That means that changes to cataloging records, for example, must be painstakingly entered individually into the various systems. There is simply no capability in these old dis-integrated systems to change a record once and effect a global change on all of the various outputs. These systems, some of which are over 25 years old, have been stretched and band-aided as far as they will go. In order to respond to contemporary service expectations they must be replaced. Therefore LPS is proposing a systems modernization effort to begin in FY 2002. We have developed a preliminary cost estimate for an up-to-date online FDLP public access catalog; one which would replace most of our legacy applications. This proposal is being built into our FY 2002 appropriations request. In the meantime, we have a lot of requirements analysis work to do, and we must decide how many traditional and possibly unique functions can and should be continued. As you may have experienced, the more unique requirements you have, the more difficult and expensive it becomes to replace your old homegrown systems. In spite of the challenges, we are convinced that LPS systems modernization is an absolutely necessary step in the evolution of the depository program. Feedback I want to close today by thanking you in advance for your comments and feedback. The Library Programs Service exists to serve you, and we depend on your input to know what you need and how to improve our services. So whether it's a beef or a bouquet - let us know. Thank you all for coming today, and I want you all to know how much we at GPO appreciate your active support for the FDLP.