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, 2001 Vol. 22, no. 16 (Vol. 22, no. 16) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Marking a Decade of Change: FDLP Developments Remarks by Gil Baldwin Director, Library Programs Service Depository Library Council Meeting Alexandria, VA October 15, 2001 Thank you for joining us today for the 10th annual Federal Depository Library Conference. A lot has changed in the decade since we began these conferences. Back then microfiche was the biggest component of the FDLP and a handful of CD's was the extent of our electronic dissemination. This morning it's my pleasure to represent a very dedicated group of people - the staff of GPO's Library Programs Service. We've all been through a lot this year, and we've been touched by events that few of us even dreamed possible. So today I want to focus more on people and their accomplishments than on operations. Personnel Changes Some of the LPS people you've known for years have left us, some through retirement and others for greener pastures. This past fiscal year saw unprecedented personnel turnover in LPS, both among the managers and the operational staff. Within a one-year span, LPS has lost four people to the Library of Congress, two to the Defense Technical Information Center, and one each to the Internal Revenue Service and the National Library of Education. These moves don't count retirements and other causes. The impact of this out-migration has been particularly marked among the library inspectors, Cataloging Branch staff, and in the Depository Distribution Division. We have some new faces for you to get to know, and some LPS managers who have really come through for you in new or expanded roles. * Bonnie Trivizas has returned to LPS as the Chief of the Library Division. Bonnie has been on a lengthy tour over in GPO's Production Dept., working on the E-CFR and other GPO Access projects. * Cornelius Greene, Chief of Depository Processing Section, has been with LPS for many years. But with Vicki Barber's departure, and Colleen Davis' retirement, he has been running the Distribution Division for you, and I know I appreciate the job that he's been doing in a Division that's lost half its managers in 6 months. * Betty Jones, formerly one of our Cataloging Branch section chiefs, became Chief of the Depository Administration Branch this summer. I'm really pleased to have Betty in this critical position, and I'm sure you'll all come to appreciate how good she is. * I want to thank Tad Downing for stepping up to the plate and covering not only the Cataloging Branch but also DAB until we got Betty in there. Covering both of these operations took an incredible effort, especially with the personnel turnover in those two Branches. * And finally, Robin Haun-Mohamed, who took over Depository Services, which means leading the inspection team, plus organizing this Conference. You all know Robin earned her spurs in DAB, and now she's carrying on the tradition in DSS. This is Robin's first conference, and I think she's done a great job in getting this organized. * But these Conferences could not happen without Willie Thompson. Willie is an expert on conference arrangements and he works non-stop with the hotels to make these things run smoothly. Please give Robin and Willie a round of applause for their hard work. There are lots of other LPS people here today as well; would you all please stand up. Thank you all. If you in the audience are finding it hard to tell all the players without a scorecard, we have an LPS organization chart as one of the handouts. And you can always find us through the "Contacts" page on the FDLP Desktop. If you would like to meet some of these people up close and personal, or you are new to the documents arena, you should check out this afternoon's 2:00PM session for "New Documents Librarians." Having lost 5 catalogers during the year, LPS is now recruiting catalogers using an "open-until-filled" announcement to fill these positions on an ongoing "flow" basis, rather than by reacting to individual vacancies. We will also soon be recruiting for 2 Cataloging Section Chief vacancies as Betty Jones has moved on and Andrea Gruhl has decided to retire. We will miss Andrea's dedication to the cataloging program, but clearly we need to get these positions filled. As of mid-September there were 20 recruitment actions underway in LPS, and of these five selections have been made, including two catalogers and two library inspectors. One new program analyst came on board in August through the Outstanding Scholar hiring program. Coupled with the high number of staff in new positions, this personnel turnover has impacted LPS' production operations and other activities. LPS Highlights for 2001 Some of LPS' highlights for the fiscal year just ended include: * FDLP publication distribution increasingly electronic * Policy guidance for acquiring online publications * Expanded role of cataloging staff * New directions for partnerships * ILS acquisitions planning process * State plans revision initiative * Web Document Digital Archive project with OCLC LPS Update The transition to a more electronic FDLP, begun over 5 years ago, is continuing, consistent with the trends in Government publishing. Last year LPS began to move ahead of the publishing agencies in terms of reliance upon online information. No longer reactively moving "in tandem" with agency publishing decisions, LPS now frequently selects only the electronic version of Government publications for FDLP even when the originating agency may still be publishing in a tangible format. This process has created an increasingly complex workload for LPS staff, and stretched the boundaries of our organizational structure. Since 1996 the FDLP has followed direction from Congress and evolved into a primarily electronic program. To illustrate, in just the last two years the distribution mix has changed from 45% online and 55% tangible in 1999, to 60% online and 40% tangible in 2001. GPO has carried out this transition in continuous consultation with the library community, publishing agencies, and other FDLP stakeholders, and each step has been developed in an open and ongoing dialog. The changes in the FDLP reflect general changes in Federal publishing practices, and in other information delivery arenas that libraries face every day. Each year more Government documents are being published solely on the Internet; when GPO has a choice between a print or an equivalent electronic document a rigorous evaluation is part of the format selection process. This process is described in the January 2001 GPO policy document (SOD 71), published after extensive discussions with the library community. The heart of this policy is that "information content remains the primary selection criteria" for inclusion in the FDLP. Many format changes begun in FY 2000 are now in effect. LPS previously established the requirements for depository copies for many publications that are printed under GPO term contracts beginning in FY 2001. Last year, LPS checked each term contract to see if that title or set of publications was available online. If so, and it did not fall into one of the exception categories, LPS changed the depository dissemination to electronic only. The results of these decisions became apparent to you in FY 2001, with nearly a 29% reduction in the number of FDLP paper titles. There has also been an even sharper reduction in the number of microfiche titles, due in large measure to the cessation of the Congressional bills in microfiche at the end of the 106th Congress. Partnerships There have been recent changes in the partner relationships between libraries and GPO. Increasingly LPS is asking its library partners to act as the administrators of service partnerships, in addition to implementing them or organizing the volunteers. Some examples include the University of Central Oklahoma taking on the administration of the Browse Topics service and, more recently, Bill Gordon at the University of North Dakota assuming responsibility for the Needs & Offers list project. LPS previously managed both of these services, although Needs & Offers has traditionally been run by a depository librarian. In fact N&O is our oldest partnership. These and other partnerships are very well served by being managed by librarians in the FDLP community, and we appreciate the contributions of those librarians and their institutions. On the content partnership front, we also have a new agency permanent access agreement with the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, CO, for their electronic reports. We're in serious negotiations for an FDLP site for Census 2000 Summary Files, and we hope we can finalize that partnership soon. And we're still looking for a partner to assist us with checking out and archiving the titles represented by the pre-FDLP Archive PURLs. 2001 Biennial Survey of Depository Libraries The 2001 Biennial Survey of Depository Libraries will be conducted on the Web from November 1 through November 30. The purpose of the Biennial Survey is to report on conditions in the depository libraries. Required by law (44 U.S.C. §1909), the Biennial Survey gathers data from all the depository libraries every 2 years, supplementing the more in-depth inspections or self-studies that are performed every 6 or 7 years. To avoid survey rush hour, you'll want to submit your survey responses as soon as possible. Additional information will be posted at the Biennial Survey web page late this month, at . Just a reminder: You will need your FDLP internal password to access the survey. If you've misplaced it, contact us at askLPS. Electronic Documents Working Group Last year at this time, Council recommended that GPO establish what has become the "Electronic Documents Working Group." Volunteer members of the depository library and law library communities are assisting GPO in its efforts to bring additional online documents into the FDLP Electronic Collection (FDLP/EC). The main functions of community volunteers is to: * Identify electronic titles that are not yet in the Program, and evaluate them for inclusion in the FDLP/EC. * Identify online titles currently in the program in tangible format for possible migration to "e-only." * Identify titles/products that are currently in the Program that have become fugitive. Determine status and availability. Recently LPS established the Working Group site on the FDLP Desktop, including lists of the participants, what agencies they are each looking at, project resources, and more. We have asked contributors to supply some basic bibliographic elements, suggest a SuDocs class stem, and so on. So there's more involved in this project than just the resource discovery phase. To support that, the various policies and processing guidelines that we use in LPS are available on the FDLP Desktop. So far we have received over 50 submissions, and 9 of these concerned URLs that might be added to existing records, rather than identifying electronic fugitive documents. If you'd like to participate in this effort, I invite you to look at the project site, stake a claim, and start mining. Web Document Digital Archive Pilot Project GPO is legally mandated to retain FDLP publications in the program permanently, whether in regional depository collections or in the FDLP/EC. We have developed a comprehensive strategy for providing permanent public access to agency publications, which includes agreements with publishing agencies and digital file preservation. GPO and its partners have made significant strides in the past five years to ensure permanent public access to online publications through bibliographic control, arrangements with Federal publishing agencies, and partnerships with universities and other institutions. A multi-year project with OCLC and cooperating libraries, the Web Document Digital Archive Pilot Project, will support the preservation of electronic publications with persistent naming, bibliographic description, a metadata schema specifically for preservation, and distributed file archiving. LPS and OCLC, Inc. are testing an initial release of a system to locate, identify, process, describe, catalog, and archive electronic publications. The Web Document Digital Archive Pilot Project has recently been expanded to include several other partners including the state libraries of Arizona, Connecticut, and Ohio. The proposed system will incorporate a mix of new and existing solutions in an effort to refine and integrate LPS workflow and routines for processing and storing e-titles for the long term. GPO is a full partner in this project, and staff has worked closely with OCLC, providing input in the development process. The initial application of the project is based on the CORC interface. Archiving functionality will be added in a subsequent development phase beginning in early 2002. In September ten LPS staff received intensive hands-on training in the CORC interface, paving the way for LPS' participation in phase one of the project. To hear more about this project, you should attend the conference plenary session Tuesday morning at 10:30 a.m., in this very chamber. LPS' own archive of electronic publications continues to evolve and grow. The highest priority candidates for this "in-house" solution remain agency publications that are primarily textual or images of text, and which have no tangible counterpart in the FDLP. Information about the operation of the FDLP/EC Archive can be found at . Those of you taking the LPS tour will also see the GPO Access "server farm" and the physical site of the FDLP Electronic Collection archive. No single electronic collection is adequate to meet the needs of different communities in this large and diverse nation, and GPO has never proposed that approach. One way in which the electronic FDLP mimics the traditional print world is that depositories create individual selection profiles tailored to local needs, and select from a collection of materials that GPO discovered and acquired for FDLP distribution. This capitalizes on the reliability and security of a distributed system, as well as meeting local needs. The requirement that libraries select and provide access to publications that meet the needs of their users is unchanged by the transition to a primarily electronic program. Far from being a monolithic entity, our Electronic Collection is a distributed set of collections, maintained by participating agencies, depository libraries, or in GPO's own archive servers. A library's item selection profile becomes a tool for providing bibliographic records in local catalogs and finding aids, rather than physical custody of the tangible items. Conclusion I want to thank each of you for being here today for the capstone of our first decade of Conferences. We know it hasn't been easy this year and we appreciate this demonstration of your commitment to the program and the work of "keeping America informed." There's no doubt that this has been a very interesting decade, and it seems that we are entering another period that tests the fundamental values of the FDLP. With your help we can continue in our joint mission to provide access to the published works of our Government, both today and into the future.