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Recent Developments Impacting the SuDocs Programs
Remarks by Francis J. Buckley, Jr.
Superintendent of Documents

Good morning and welcome to San Antonio. Customarily the Public Printer has opened the Council meeting and extended his appreciation for everyone's attendance and participation. Unfortunately, Mr. DiMario's travel schedule will not permit him to arrive until later this afternoon, so he will address you tomorrow. In the meantime, I have the pleasure of welcoming you all to San Antonio.

"I like the story, doubtless antique, that I heard comes from near San Antonio. A child asks a stranger where he comes from, whereupon his father rebukes him gently, "Never do that, son. If a man’s from Texas, he’ll tell you. If he’s not, why embarrass him by asking?" John Gunther, Inside U.S.A., 1947

I am pleased that you made it here to San Antonio, airline strikes and threatened strikes notwithstanding AND that you followed us on our journey from one hotel to another. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

As usual we have an ambitious program with updates from GPO staff and presentations from NCLIS and the Census Bureau as well as many of your depository colleagues to address current government information policy issues and the operation of the FDLP.

I'd like to discuss some of the general issues and recent developments impacting the SuDocs programs. Gil Baldwin, T.C. Evans and George Barnum will be discussing a number of specific operational issues that affect you in your libraries and I don’t want to (well, I have been asked not to) steal their thunder.

I had the pleasure of speaking at the annual Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC) forum last week, which had the theme of "Preserving our Federal Heritage in the Digital Era." The keynote speaker was Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee. Senator Stevens began by reading from a prepared speech about the topic. But then he said he would deviate from the prepared text (a staff person’s worst nightmare!) and went on to say how important it was to preserve digital and printed words. He said that libraries have an enormous responsibility to preserve our history and that important information should be stored and preserved. He said that the issue of preserving digital information hit home when he made a note on his computer about a particular incident, but kept a paper copy. He was unable to find the hard copy when he needed it and has yet to track down the information on his computer.

I was on a panel addressing the roles of central Federal agencies in creating the Government's digital archive with Lew Bellardo, Deputy Archivist from the National Archives and Records Administration, and Laura Campbell, Associate Librarian for Strategic Initiatives, who is responsible for the Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.

We all agreed on the importance, and indeed necessity, of preservation of digital information. I even quoted Patrick Henry who said, "I know of no way of judging the future but by the past" – in a speech in the Virginia Convention, March 1775. And George Santayana's comment: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (The Life of Reason, 1905-1906.)

Both NARA and LC are involved in research and pilot projects to model and test concepts for archival programs. GPO on the other hand, has instituted a program to begin to systemically capture records for depository electronic publications, that are, at least potentially, at risk. George Barnum will shortly discuss our operations in more detail.

And you may be aware of GPO's efforts in the area of permanent public access initiating meetings with other Federal agencies, national libraries, Congressional staff, public interest groups and other organizations outside of the government that are concerned with the preservation of, and access to, government information produced electronically. These permanent public access working group meetings have, we hope, engendered an environment of cooperation among those engaged in related activities. In fact, I saw a number of meeting participants at the FLICC Forum and was asked by them when the next meeting will be. Since John Stevenson is the Council liaison to this working group and has attended the last two meetings, I will say here that staff will be arranging another meeting for later this spring.

We also anticipate being involved in the planning effort of the Library of Congress to develop the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program I mentioned earlier. LC is to develop the plan in collaboration with other national libraries, Federal agencies, and other public and private organizations involved in efforts to preserve, collect, and disseminate information in digital formats. The plan is to "set forth a strategy for the Library of Congress, in collaboration with other Federal and non-Federal entities, to identify a national network of libraries and other organizations with responsibilities for collecting digital materials that will provide access to and maintain those materials. In addition to developing this strategy, the plan shall set forth, in concert with the Copyright Office, the policies, protocols, and strategies for the long-term preservation of such materials, including the technological infrastructure required at the Library of Congress. In developing the plan, the Library should be mindful of the conclusions drawn in a recent National Academy of Sciences report concerning the Library’s trend toward insularity and isolation from its clients and peers in the transition toward digital content."

In the consolidated Appropriations Act for 2001, LC was authorized up to $100 million for this program; $75 million must be matched by non-Federal funds. LC is just beginning to plan how to set up the planning process.

Also as you may be aware, the General Accounting Office (GAO) was directed in our FY 2001 funding bill to conduct a comprehensive study on the impact of providing documents to the public solely in electronic format and to assess how to transfer the depository library program to the Library of Congress and measures necessary to ensure the success of such a transfer. We had invited a representative to report on their study, which was due to Congress last Friday, but she withdrew last week due to the press of business, and as of 5:30 pm last Friday we had not received a copy of their report. I will therefore only make a few comments about the process and our reactions to the draft of the report.

GPO staff had many meetings with GAO -- indeed I know that a number of you in the audience today also met with the GAO staff. We had an opportunity to review a draft of the report and had only one week to respond with questions, comments or corrections. But respond we did -- and the letter from Mr. DiMario to GAO is included in your packets. We were very concerned about the scant attention to all the issues involved in an assessment of the impact of all-electronic dissemination, the draft did not address how public access to Federal government information would be improved by transferring the FDLP to LC, or really examine the congruence of missions, operations and the costs involved. There were unclear and confusing comments about GPO Access, but apparently they intended splitting up GPO Access and transferring responsibilities for the FDLP/EC only to LC, closing the integrated aspects of GPO Access production and maintenance.

I encourage you to read Mr. DiMario’s letter to GAO. In addition, we analyzed the draft and found 109 instances where there were factual errors, misinterpretations, etc., and we communicated them to the GAO staff. When we have the opportunity to review the final report we will see what they have accepted from our comments, as well as their response to the questions and issues raised by Mr. DiMario.

From what we understand, the Library of Congress had minimal discussions with GAO as to their ability to undertake the responsibility of running the FDLP or the cost or operational concerns. GAO only met with LC staff twice for brief periods and based their report on studies done in 1993 and 1994. LC feels the whole idea should be deferred pending the strategic planning initiative for digital information they will be undertaking. They also questioned the absence of any quantifiable or substantive benefit to users that would be achieved by consolidation. We have asked for sufficient copies to make distribution to all depositories.

At this conference Judy Russell, Deputy Director of NCLIS, will be reporting on the issuance of the Commission report: A Comprehensive Assessment of Public Information Dissemination. Volume 1 of their study was issued more than a month ago, and sent to all depository libraries. Volume 2 with legislative and regulatory proposals was just released last Friday and is in the process of being printed for all depositories. As you are probably aware, the Commission is recommending restructuring all government information dissemination into Public Information Resource Administrations (PIRA) in each branch of government, with the Executive Branch PIRA responsible for all dissemination and sales programs (including NTIS).

Mr. DiMario has officially responded that he does not think such a sweeping reorganization or the transfer of the SuDocs information dissemination programs into the Executive Branch is necessary or appropriate.

I am sure that many of you who read GOVDOC-L recently saw some messages that raised concerns about statements put forth by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) calling for a "diversity of information sources in the digital age, " in their White Paper, "Challenges and Opportunities for 2001." In their proposals for government information policy they stated:

"As we progress further into the digital age, advancements in information technology promise to dramatically increase the ease of public access to government information, both directly and through private sector disseminators. However, when considering new models for dissemination of public information, the government must continue to uphold the greatest commitment to the free flow of information through a diversity of information sources. The public is not served when the government, or some other provider, is the only source of public information."

I have to suggest, however, that the public is not served when a fee-based private or non-profit sector products is the only source of public information.

The SIIA policy on preventing government competition with the private sector went on to say that, "Government initiatives to disseminate public information electronically should not result in expanding the role of government in providing commercial information services. Rather, government efforts to disseminate information should take full advantage of public-private partnerships or independent private services and products to efficiently and effectively provide the desired added value for the public."

As Dan Barkley correctly pointed out on GOVDOC-L: "This issue strikes me as very reminiscent of the privatization issues librarians faced in the late 1980's."

We understand a number of private sector information aggregators are attempting to call into question government information indexing and abstracting (and even full-text) products, which are mission-related, subject-oriented products incorporating government publications, and contributed private-sector information. Suggestions have been made that they should not produce such products or if they do, the products should be kept within the agency and not provided to the public.

In a related development, in October of last year, a report commissioned by the Computer and Communications Industry Association was released. Titled, "The Role of Government in a Digital Age," the authors laid out principals for government action and labeled them with a green, yellow or red light. A green light was given to "providing public data and information is a government role." Good so far, but then came the yellow light: "the government should exercise caution in adding specialized value to public data and information." And the topper -- the red light: "the government should exercise substantial [emphasis added] caution in entering markets in which private-sector firms are active."

So, not only is the future of PubMed Central (produced by the National Institutes of Health) at risk, as noted in Michele McNelly's recent posting to GOVDOC-L, but so is the fate of PubScience, produced by one of our stalwart partners, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) at the Department of Energy, as well as ERIC, produced by the National Library of Education.

I find this push from elements of the private sector ironic in light of comments last week by Steven Emmert, Director of Government and Industry Affairs, Lexis-Nexis, at the same FLICC Forum I mentioned earlier. He was frank and honest about the private sector’s interest in and ability to preserve proprietary value-added databases of Federal information. Essentially he said there’s little room for altruism in the private sector. They must make money to stay in business and reward stockholders. If a product is not generating funds to support itself or to provide a sufficient return on investment it will be cut--even a sympathetic CEO cannot carry products that do not contribute to the bottom line. Thus the role of the private sector in the preservation of government and non-government digital information would only last as long as there was a market for the information and someone was paying for it. This is one of the issues concerning LC and research libraries for government and non-government information.

There has been much talk recently about the issue of Internet filtering in libraries engendered by restrictions on the use of Federal LSTA, ESEA, or e-rate funds that require Internet safety policies and the use of technology that blocks or filters certain materials. Of course many of the libraries in the depository system are affected by the Federal mandate. When this question comes up, we refer to our filtering policy, which was enunciated in the FDLP Internet Use Policy Guidelines, published in the January 15, 1999 Administrative Notes (v. 20, # 2). The section on filtering states:

"Since the use of filtering software may restrict access to official FDLP information, for example in the health or biological sciences fields, depository libraries must allow users the option to use workstations without filtering software or to turn off the filter while searching FDLP information."

Use or access may be mediated or unmediated. The availability of one or more of these options in library policies would seem to comport with the requirements of the legislation and our public access concerns.

These are interesting times for the FDLP, GPO and for you in the depository community. We appreciate your continued support for our efforts.

Enjoy San Antonio!

Howdy, partners! It’s a lot of fun to be meeting with you deep in the heart of Texas, and to have Council, as Willie Nelson would say … "on the road again." This morning I want to cover some of the changes and activities that have been going on at the Library Programs Service (LPS) and to highlight some of the upcoming presentations on this meeting’s agenda.

One of the big news items for LPS has been staff changes. This has been a period of significant turnover among our staff. As you no doubt know, our former Council mistress of ceremonies, Sheila McGarr, left LPS in December to become the director of the National Library of Education. As great as that was for her and for NLE, it meant a lot of adjustments within LPS to fill the gap, especially since she had been wearing two hats. As Chief of the Library Division, Sheila had management oversight responsibility for the Cataloging Branch, the Depository Administration Branch (DAB), and the Depository Services Staff (DSS). The Depository Services Staff includes the library inspection team, the responsibility for LPS publishing, and event planning for the annual Federal Depository Library Conference, the Council meetings, and the annual Interagency Seminar. In order to cover these critical activities, I named Robin Haun-Mohamed as permanent Chief of the DSS.

The transition of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) to a program that emphasizes the discovery, cataloging, and management of online publications has brought about many operational adjustments in LPS' work. During the past year LPS has experimented with an Electronic Collection Team. More recently, we have begun new work processes and assignments based on a closer coordination between the Cataloging Branch and DAB staff. Therefore, Thomas A. Downing, is addition to carrying on as the Chief of the Cataloging Branch, also has been named the acting Chief of the Depository Administration Branch.

Vicki Barber, Chief of the Depository Distribution Division, has been detailed to the Superintendent of Documents' staff to assist in implementing the Integrated Processing System (IPS) in the Documents Sales Service. This detail is expected to last up to one year. Consequently, Colleen Davis, Chief of the Depository Processing Branch, has been detailed to the position of Chief of the Depository Distribution Division.

We presently have a number of staff vacancies that we are trying to fill. We are in the hiring process for one inspector, one publications management specialist, two catalogers, a program analyst, Chief of the Micrographics Section in DAB, the Chief of DAB, and the Library Division Chief. These hires do not represent organizational growth or empire-building; filling these jobs will just us get back to where we were a year ago.

We will also request additional personnel as part of our FY2002 budget proposal. We would like to bring on additional catalogers, another inspector, and personnel to work on enhancing the FDLP Electronic Collection. The fate of these proposals remains to be seen, but I believe that they are essential to providing the level of service that you expect and deserve.

Since last fall, we have been pushing ahead with the transition to a primarily electronic FDLP. As you may remember, the reasons for this hurry-up are specific Congressional direction and reduced funding. The result of our efforts has been to raise the bar yet again for the amount of electronic products in the FDLP. For the October through February period, 61% of the new titles in the FDLP were online electronic. And you may expect this trend to continue.

At the last Council meeting, LPS presented drafts of two important working documents for our staff to use in acquiring publications for the FDLP, and in particular in making the decision of when to make a certain publication electronic only. These documents are the Superintendent of Documents’ policy statement on "Dissemination/Distribution Policy for the FDLP" (SOD 71) and the related list of "Essential Titles for Public Use in Paper Format." We listened closely to the input from Council and from the library community, and incorporated the substance and spirit of those comments into our final version. Both SOD 71 and the expanded list of "Essential Titles for Public Use in Paper Format" were published in the January 15, 2001, issue of Administrative Notes (v 22, #2) and are also available on the FDLP Desktop.

This fiscal year GPO will begin producing the 2000 bound cumulative edition of the U.S. Code. We are pleased to say that this essential product will be made available to all selecting depositories in case-bound format, although International Exchange libraries will get the paperbound edition. This is the single most expensive product in the FDLP; at almost $1.9 million it uses up almost 20% of the FDLP acquisitions budget. Originally we estimated the 2000 U.S. Code at $1.6 million, but the number of volumes in the set has grown. Obviously we have to do some cost saving elsewhere to make room for the 600-pound gorilla of the FDLP. We continue to make product-by-product decisions that will ultimately reduce multiple format distribution in the FDLP by trimming the distribution of physical products.

Since last summer, as we communicated in the August 2000 letter to the directors of depository libraries, LPS has been taking action to terminate the physical distribution of numerous titles when there is an official and reliable online version available. This means that we are no longer simply proceeding with the transition in tandem with the actions of the publishing agencies. Now that we are getting out ahead of the agencies we are running into a new set of operational issues. Product acquisitions through GPO’s labyrinthine system can have a life of their own, particularly in cases where agencies are placing the depository orders by attaching riders to term contracts. In such cases agencies often overlook our directions to stop acquiring print copies and keep on ordering FDLP stock that shows up on our doorstep. Worse yet we get charged for it. Up to this point, our policy has been to go ahead and distribute it, but this has a couple of big disadvantages. First, we give you a mixed message, by telling you that a title is going electronic only, but the paper copies keep showing up. And second, we’re not realizing the savings that we need.

Since most of these situations involve term contracts, we are working with GPO’s Customer Service department to get the agencies to follow our directions. Agencies will be charged for stock that they over-order on our behalf, and the excess copies will be returned to the publishing agency. This is a lot of follow-up work, but we must break the cycle of faulty ordering by agencies being charged to us. With individual monographs, general publications for the most part, we are better positioned to make these format decisions at the front end. LPS has publications management specialists stationed in the Customer Service Department. The LPS people review incoming printing orders to see if it belongs in the FDLP, and if there is an online alternative that meets our selection criteria. In many cases they can make an immediate decision to go electronic-only on a given title before any stock is ordered.

The shift to a primarily electronic FDLP requires us to revisit and revise other documentation, including the Instructions to Depository Libraries, specifically the guidance on the recommended basic collection for any depository library. This list was last revised in 1993, and in the meantime some of the products have ceased, some have changed titles, and several now have online versions that may serve your customers’ needs better than hard copy. The LPS staff has reviewed the list and prepared a draft for discussion at this meeting. One of the underlying approaches to revising the basic collection list is to focus on the content rather than the distribution media. LPS believes that these products should be available to the public in any depository collection, but your local needs should dictate whether you select the print or the online version.

This proposal is contained in the salmon-colored handout entitled "Revise the Basic Collection " and it will be discussed in a Council working session at 2:30 today.

As we move toward a primarily electronic Program, the operations within LPS are changing as well. As Tad Downing has told you many times, the electronic environment has created significant new workloads for LPS, and made the catalogers’ tasks much more complex. Our catalogers are now involved in the discovery, evaluation, and selection of online resources, as well as in assigning PURLs to those resources and archiving them. We are giving our best effort to controlling the new online resources and describing the relationships to their tangible counterparts.

Inevitably this work has been accompanied by evolving policies and practices. We have just completed a thorough revision of our cataloging priorities guideline; one that gives full recognition to the importance of cataloging the online resources in the FDLP.

Included in this priority guideline is the statement that "In general it is GPO’s policy to create a cataloging record based on the format that was distributed or made accessible via the FDLP. Therefore, if a publication is included in the FDLP solely in online format, GPO will create a cataloging record for the online version, and appropriate record links will be made from a record describing a physical manifestation of the same content." Our cataloging policy is part of the same transition that affects the Program overall, and we are acting in recognition of the fact that bibliographic control linked to content is the critical factor in an electronic FDLP. You may read the cataloging priority guideline in our response to Recommendation 1 from the fall 2000 Council meeting, or in the April 15 issue of Administrative Notes (v 22, #6).

Another guideline that we are working on is the classification policy for online products. In looking back we find that the "GPO Classification Manual" is silent on this matter, hardly surprising given that the last revision was in 1993. We have developed a draft guideline for classifying online resources, and we are test-driving it within LPS. Later this spring we will post the draft guideline on the FDLP Desktop and get your comments and feedback before we finalize it.

LPS has begun modernizing the automated systems used in LPS in support of the FDLP. For many years LPS has used four legacy systems:

• ACSIS (Acquisitions, Classification, and Shipment Information System) put in operation about 1992.
• DDIS (Depository Distribution Information System) designed in the late 1970’s.
• MoCat system for cataloging and Monthly Catalog production, started about 1976.
• ADDS (Automated Depository Distribution System, formerly known as the Lighted Bin System), started about 1985.

In recent years, it has become obvious that these old systems do not communicate, interact and exchange data well, and they are unable to support your expectations for service. This is truer than ever now that most depositories use commercial Integrated Library Systems (ILS). We are looking into replacing at least the first three and possibly all four of the old LPS systems. The most likely way to attain this goal is to obtain a commercial, off-the-shelf ILS and to use it for as many of our processes as it is able to support. Currently we are looking at three very well known ILS packages. Just coincidentally, they are the top three library systems reported in use at depository libraries.

We are also examining some of the ways in which we do things, to better make them fit into standard library practice and meet the capabilities of a standard software package. Ms. Laurie B. Hall, supervisory program analyst, is taking the lead on the LPS systems modernization effort. While we are in this planning stage, we would like to get input from you about your expectations of what an LPS automated system should do. I hope that you will be able to attend our Wednesday morning "LPS Systems Modernization Discussion Group." Laurie will present some background information about our current systems environment. Then we want to hear from you about the services and features a system must offer in the FDLP of the future.

The need for systems modernization has a very direct impact on our ability to process work, and specifically to answer your inquiries. I’m referring to askLPS, our email channel for inquiries about the FDLP operations. In the most recent 6 months, we received about 5700 email inquiries, and we processed 5300, or about 93% of them. Most of these inquiries come in directly to an individual person, not to the askLPS general email box. The askLPS questions run about 40% about classification, 25% about fugitive documents and "whatever happened to…" another 25% for cataloging and PURLs, about 5% for distribution and claims inquiries, and another 5% miscellaneous. Many of these questions require significant amounts of research, and then the results need to be posted to our legion of legacy systems. It’s a time-consuming process, averaging 30-60 minutes per inquiry to research, process, and respond. And the fact is we have no staff purely dedicated to responding to askLPS questions and other inquiries. It’s an ancillary duty for 6 or 7 different people, many of whom are here today, including Laurie and Robin.

Meanwhile, the inquiries keep on coming in back at home. In order to keep up at all, we are obliged to perform a triage on inquiries. One category includes inquiries that have already been answered. Another category is the multi-paragraph questions that could take hours of research to unravel all of the threads. The third category, and this is where we put most of our efforts, is questions that can be answered in a reasonable amount of time, especially if they involve fairly new material in the program. When we left for this trip, we had about 500 inquiries on hand. Answering inquiries has always been a resource issue for LPS, so we need to look for some innovative ways to work together on these questions. One approach that would reduce everyone’s frustration is for folks to look in the Serials Supplement, in WEBTechNotes, and so on, before they send in a question. We still find lots that have already been answered. Another approach might be to partner with people in the library community to assist with some of the underlying research. There is a long tradition of this kind of voluntarism in the FDLP, and it can really benefit everyone if done well.

I believe that it is an honor to be part of this program. It’s a real bargain for the public, in terms of services delivered for the dollars invested. We value your comments and feedback, and we do our best to be responsive. I only hope that others can learn how much these services mean to constituents, in terms of economic impact, distance education, civic involvement and the like. Librarians are always thought to love to read, and we know that you love to write as well. Just make sure to write other people who can influence the program as well. Thank you coming today and helping to keep public information one of the nation’s strengths. And one more thought before I step down. I want to express LPS’ appreciation to all of the folks on the local arrangements committee here in San Antonio. Your help and hospitality means a lot to us and to the success of these meetings. Thank you all!

I appreciate the opportunity to update the Depository Library Council and the library community on the current and future state of GPO Access. The good people back at GPO who make it all happen have been hard at work, so there is plenty to report. As always, I tip my hat to their efforts to keep this ever-growing colossus moving forward.

Hopefully, you have a copy of our GPO Access update [see p. 23]. It contains size and usage numbers, as well as what is new and on the horizon.

GPO Access continues to grow, with almost 1,900 official government databases offered through some 80 applications. At this time, approximately 203,000 electronic titles are available through the FDLP Electronic Collection, with 119,000 titles on GPO servers and almost 84,000 titles linked to from GPO Access.

GPO Access usage continues to amaze, with recent months bringing us to some significant milestones. The more than 26 million retrievals in October propelled total usage of GPO Access to over 1 billion documents retrieved since the service premiered in 1994. January produced the highest total to date, with more than 32 million documents downloaded.

It will be interesting to watch these totals in upcoming months, particularly as the implementation of our new contract with the Akamai content delivery network progresses. The improved response time, particularly for downloading large files, should enable users to more successfully retrieve documents as more and more GPO Access applications become "akamaized." Yes, you heard correctly. The process of "akamaizing" the site refers to the work necessary to deliver files through the Akamai network of more than 8,500 servers geographically dispersed around the world when a user clicks on a link on a GPO Access page, including search results. Simply put, this allows us to dramatically spread the load for delivering requested files and makes it likely that a user is downloading a file from a server located near them rather than all the way from Washington, D.C.

As an example, let me describe the difference this would make in delivering the Supreme Court decision on the election. Instead of the millions of users all trying to download the file from GPO servers at the same time, a maximum of 8,500 requests would arrive at GPO from the Akamai servers, who would then serve up the files to users in their areas when those users clicked on that link on the Supreme Court Web site. Akamai servers first check to see if they have the file in cache, and if not, look in their region and beyond in expanding arcs until coming to GPO as a last resort. Once they initially pull the file from GPO, it is held in cache on the local server to handle requests from users for a period of time established by GPO.

This process began with the Supreme Court Web site hosted on GPO Access and the daily table of contents to the Federal Register. Our Production department will be working to carry this work to other GPO Access applications as soon as possible, based on priorities we have provided that are based on usage popularity.

While we believe that this will serve to reduce most of the problems being experienced by users, we will continue to strive towards other improvements that will benefit our users. This includes a geographically separate mirror site under development at the GPO regional facility in Denver, Colorado. Work has begun to expand the available bandwidth at the facility and the specs for the necessary hardware and software are being drawn up so that they may be procured and put in place. We have developed a plan for migrating copies of the databases that matches the popularity of the databases at the main GPO Access site. When complete, this site will provide backup in the event that the main GPO Access site cannot be reached and could be brought in play to relieve use burdens in times of heavy demand for popular information.

We are also actively engaged in expanding our ability to measure the performance of the GPO Access system from the user’s perspective. Two different tracks will be pursued concurrently. The first track involves a contract with the Keynote performance measurement service. This contract will provide information on the performance of the system as it would be experienced by users who are both geographically and technologically diverse. The initial focus will be on 12 of the most popular applications on GPO Access. In addition to measuring the basics such as page load times, it will also measure performance of transactions such as searches and file downloads.

The second track will rely on volunteers from our user communities to act as our eyes and ears to test system performance. For our initial examination, my staff has developed a short set of exercises to be performed by volunteer users in relation to the degree of improvement realized through our new relationship with the Akamai content delivery network. Users will record the results and pass them through e-mail to Selene Dalecky for aggregation and analysis. Copies of these exercises are available as a handout in the back of the room. I urge you to take a few minutes and help us with this important task. For those of you who can volunteer to help us for a few minutes each month, a new set of exercises will be sent out each month to get an accurate assessment of key issues at that time. In both cases, we need volunteers from all areas of the country and with all kinds of technology. I assure you that we will limit the size of the tasks to something that will not be overly intrusive on your valuable time, but that will provide us with data of great significance.

We have begun monitoring the number of referrals to GPO Access from other Web sites. This is accomplished through the use of referral logs that record the host domain from which a referred user was directed to one of the pages on GPO Access. It has been most gratifying to see just how many referrals occur in the short time we have been analyzing these logs, as well as the broad array of sites who direct users to us.

Part of our referral review has been to track the number of times users are referred to us from depository Web sites. While some have remained remarkably consistent, it has been interesting to speculate on the vacillation of others. During the first four months of measurement we have recorded referrals from 660 of the 796 registered depository sites and we hope to see referrals from the rest as we move forward in time.

Part of the impetus for reviewing referral logs came from a request to determine how many referrals we have been receiving from FirstGov. In the first two months, their totals represented about one half of one percent of the total referrals received. The third month declined to about one quarter of one percent and the total declined further in the fourth month, falling to just over three one hundredths of one percent.

My staff is in the process of completing an update of an analysis first conducted when FirstGov premiered to see how well their site directs users to the products and services of GPO Access. The primary goal of these analyses is to provide a basis for working with the developers of FirstGov to ensure that their coverage of the resources of GPO Access is maximized. I have recently spoken with the director of FirstGov, who expressed great interest in seeing our analysis and in working with us to help users discover GPO Access.

There are a number of recent changes to GPO Access that should be mentioned. The most notable are:

• The new Davis-Bacon Wage Determination site. This site provides free access to wage determinations issued by the U.S. Department of Labor under the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts. The Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor determines prevailing wage rates to be paid on Federally funded or assisted construction projects.

• A summary of the President’s budget plan titled "A Blueprint for New Beginnings – A Responsible Budget for America’s Priorities"

• My staff has recently completed the Third Edition of the GPO Access Legislative Resources Comparison Report. I would also like to pass along a word of thanks to Mary Alice Baish of AALL and Suzanne Campbell in the GPO Law Library for their excellent assistance in this effort. The report compares the congressional and other legislative branch information available on GPO Access with data available on other government and non-government Web sites. I am pleased to report that GPO Access continues to excel among the compared sites, providing access to 19 of the 22 legislative resources measured. All versions of the Legislative Comparison Report are available on the Federal Bulletin Board.

As always, work is under way to add more content to GPO Access and to refine access to the materials already provided. Some key examples of current efforts are:

• An eCFR application, which will be updated daily as opposed to the current quarterly updated Code of Federal Regulations application, should be fully available by summer.

• As a result of the development of the free eCFR application, the Sales program is developing a new e-mail subscription service. Customers will be able to purchase subscriptions that will allow them to be notified via e-mail of any changes in one or more CFR titles and/or parts, as they are published in the Federal Register.

• We will be conducting the first Ben’s Guide focus group on May 9, 2001 in Long Island, New York. The focus group is being offered in conjunction with a speech at the Long Island Library Conference. We will be meeting with students from local schools in an attempt to gain feedback about Ben’s Guide from a student’s perspective. Currently, classes from grades K-2 and 3-5 have volunteered to participate. Efforts to gather input from grades 6-8 and 9-12 as well as a parent, teacher, and librarian perspectives are still being explored.

• We are also undertaking an examination of Section 508 of the Workforce Investment Act, which is meant to increase accessibility for the disabled in the workplace, to determine how it might apply to GPO Access Web pages. In particular, we are looking at how the sixteen Section 508 standards increase accessibility, and how each of these standards might be applied to the GPO Access Web site and its hosted sites to make them more accessible.

• We are constantly looking for valuable feedback to improve the usability of GPO Access. A number of methods are used for this purpose, including focus groups, online surveys, and of course, questions and comments received by the GPO Access User Support Team on a daily basis. In addition to these mechanisms, we have started doing usability testing at a usability-testing lab at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington DC, in order to get immediate feedback on how users find government information on GPO Access. This will provide us with another measure of the effectiveness and efficiency of our site, as well as the satisfaction of users. One of the interesting things learned in the first series of tests involved ways in which users utilize our site contents page, which should lead to some significant improvements on that important resource. If you are interested in participating in future usability studies for GPO Access, or hosting them at your institution, please contact us. The contact information is in the handout.

Another topic that has been of great interest during the electronic transition is authentication of the electronic versions of official print publications. This is particularly true when the decision is made to rely solely on that electronic version and cease the dual distribution in paper. We are working towards utilizing Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI, to ensure non-repudiation evidence that the file retrieved by the user from GPO Access was created by the appropriate authority and that it has not been altered since it was created.

In accordance with Section 706 of Title 44 USC, GPO produces the official print versions of Congressional Bills. These printed versions of these important instruments are universally accepted as such. By establishing PKI certificate authority for those responsible for producing both these printed copies and the exact duplicate electronic versions, GPO can provide evidence to the user that the electronic version was created as part of the official process. In addition to this validation, the user of these authenticated files will be able to easily ascertain that this official file has not been altered since its creation, as well as when it was signed by the creating authority. This will be accomplished through the use of a free reader installed on users’ machines that works in conjunction with their Web browsers and helper applications such as the ADOBE Acrobat Reader.

The law also validates the use of digital signatures. In section 101 of the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (Public Law 106-226), it states "a signature, contract, or other record relating to such transaction may not be denied legal effect, validity, or enforceability solely because it is in electronic form."

GPO will embark on this important effort with diligent speed, but the size and complexity of this project should not be underestimated. In an article in the February 2001 issue of Imaging and Document Solutions Magazine, Jim Minihan stated "The legislation largely puts to rest the issue of the acceptance of electronic documents." He went on to say, however, "Be advised that building a PKI is an enormous undertaking, especially if unrelated third parties will rely on the signatures." This is certainly the case with Congressional Bills and all of the official Federal documents made available through GPO Access, so GPO will be careful to take sufficient time to do it right.

While neither this action, nor anything else that GPO can do will force acceptance of electronic versions by outside parties, it is the most positive means of guaranteeing that the user has received the same official text that appeared in the print version. Hopefully, in conjunction with the recently passed law, it will help foster the acceptance of the electronic version in official matters.

Our ongoing effort to improve the accessibility of GPO Access resources through popular search engines continues. Unfortunately, despite our efforts, performance has continued to decline. The evidence suggests that much of the decline can be attributed to the growing trend towards various methods of paid positioning. Because of our commitment to achieving the best possible results for searchers whose needs could be met by the resources of GPO Access, we are in the process of testing some of these methods. These tests will initially focus on the U.S. Government Online Bookstore portion of GPO Access, the results will be studied, and a decision will be made regarding how to proceed in terms of the rest of the site. All of our reports from this project are available on the Federal Bulletin Board.

I would like to note in closing that a look at the eCFR application has been added to the topics for the GPO Access open forum on Tuesday. Thank you for your attention and I look forward to discussing your ideas for a better GPO Access during the conference.

I’d like to take a moment as I begin this to thank Mr. DiMario for altering his travel arrangements, so that this morning’s lineup had to be shifted slightly, taking me out of the "right before lunch" slot, which is never an enviable place to be.

It is, as ever, a pleasure to be before you with an update on what’s simmering on my stove currently. My objective this morning is to update you a bit, and remind you as well, about where we are and what we’re doing about the creation of this "comprehensive digital library of U.S. Government information."

First some background. In April, 2001 we are almost five years into the transition to a more or mostly electronic FDLP. We can observe that in practice the FDLP has evolved to perform four broad functions:

• Deposit. The functions that relate to selection, acquisition, distribution, and physical control of publications (classification, etc.) by GPO, including the retention of ownership of deposited publications by the Government, and inspection to assure compliance;

• Assurance of current and permanent public access, including the requirements made of depository libraries for free access to the general public, retention schedules, and service to users of Government information;

• Provision of locator tools, including the statutorily mandated catalogs and indexes GPO produces as well as bibliographic description and other types of finding aids;

• Promotion and facilitation of use, including training opportunities, conferences, and marketing.

It is in the first two categories, deposit and assurance of access, that the transition to a more electronically-based program has had the most fundamental effect. In the print world the system of deposit provides a stable and secure environment in which information is, as a by-product of the legal requirement that Government printing be either performed or contracted for by GPO, funneled into a geographically distributed and fairly closely regulated system of outlets. In the Internet environment, federal agencies no longer have an imperative to involve GPO in the dissemination of their information, and the need for redundant housing of copies of publications to achieve geographical equity is obviated by the ability to use a single source from multiple remote locations. At the same time, needs and expectations on the part of librarians and library users for access to this information have grown.

The attempt to reinvent distributed, permanent access has centered on the creation of the FDLP Electronic Collection, a digital library conceived on fairly traditional library collection development principles, and consisting of an interdependent set of locator tools, user interfaces, links to content on agency servers, a digital archive, and various kinds of metadata. The collection is being built using a standard collection development document which emphasizes a blending of new and adapted roles for the depository program.

Fundamentally, the FDLP must continue to provide access, through its network of designated libraries, to the information that its enabling statute describes as being in scope. The everyday realities of providing both actual electronic access and bibliographic/intellectual access tools have been in a state of almost constant change since the first introduction of electronic products in the early 1990s. Previously the processing of materials from the printing press through GPO’s verification and distribution mechanisms and into libraries was a highly detailed process not far removed either in concept or practice from other mass-production processes employed in a large printing and publishing concern. The shift to a digital FDLP has altered this model, changing the skills and workflow required to provide access. As you well know, the size and composition of the workforce performing these tasks at GPO is changing, with an increase in the need for so-called knowledge workers superseding the need for production-line materials handlers and lower-level clerical employees. Many of you are seeing a shift in the skills needed within your libraries and documents operations as well.

I’ve now been back at GPO as Electronic Collection Manager for 18 months. During my first tour at GPO, between mid-1997 and mid-1999, we began in earnest to erect the framework of the "more electronic FDLP" described in the 1996 Transition Study and Transition Plan. We published the Collection Plan in 1998, giving the Electronic Collection not only its name but its basic structure: the universe of U.S. Government electronic publications divided into four broad categories:

• Core legislative and regulatory GPO Access products that reside permanently on Government Printing Office (GPO) servers (e.g.: Congressional Record, Bills, Slip Laws, House and Senate Reports & Documents)

• Products which GPO manages on the GPO Access site, and content partnerships

• Products that GPO identifies, describes, and links to but which remain under the control of the originating agencies

• Tangible electronic Government information products distributed to Federal depository libraries (e.g.: CD/ROM; DVD; floppy disk).

In the context of the Collection Plan we identified key areas of activity that, taken together, comprise an architecture for the collection:

• Intake

1. Discovery
2. Evaluation
3. Selection
4. Acquisition

• Registry

1. Item number/Classification assignment
2. New Electronic Titles

• Storage

1. FDLP/EC Archive
2. Partner Archives
3. Agency Agreements

• Cataloging and Locators

1. CGP
2. PURL
3. Browse Topics

• User Interface

We’ve been active in every one of these areas, and all the areas are closely interconnected. I want to focus today on our archive activities, but bear in mind that it’s impossible to talk about archiving without talking about many of the other areas of activity.

To begin with, I want to explain, once again, just what we’re doing about archiving for permanent public access. Remember that that’s our point: permanent public access. We’re not an archival repository in the traditional, "preserving essential evidence" sense.

Our strategy is (and has been) that no single solution will be the be-all and end-all of archiving. Thus we’re putting together a varied menu of solutions that includes:

• Agreements with agencies that are willing to guarantee that their publications will remain available on the web, from the agency server, for all time (the most recent are NCLIS and NLM)
• Partner sites such as UIC and North Texas which have specific emphases
• The core legislative and regulatory material on GPO Access, which is permanent by statute
• Our own on-site archive

We are also investigating other kinds of solutions:

• Archiving on servers operated by contractors/vendors (including redundant/mirror sites or failsafe arrangements
• The Stanford LOCKSS model, which distributes copies to caches in a ring

Our own archiving effort is in full operation, for publications that meet the following criteria:

• Electronic only in the FDLP (no paper distribution)
• Not covered by an agency agreement
• Not included in a depository partnership
• Not available only in a proprietary format or with proprietary access software

We are capturing publications, listing them in NET, cataloging them (as appropriate) in CGP, and retaining a copy of the captured publication on our servers.

Every one of these new additions receives a PURL. Those links are being checked regularly and when we discover that a publication is no longer available on the publishing site (by that check or by being told by someone else) we verify what has become of the publication and redirect the PURL to the archived copy. This actually happens with two titles currently. The final piece of our initial development of this model is the screen that appears to the user when that redirect to the FDLP/EC Archive takes place, informing the user that the copy they’re getting is an archived copy.

Is this system perfect? No, probably not. Is it working so far? Yes. Is it a retrospective effort covering every single electronic title we’ve ever heard of? Nope. We started it in a full scale way in 2000. That said, I can tell you that we’re negotiating right now with a depository library to do the retrospective work that will get all the pre-FDLP/EC Archive PURLs (about 2500) and URLs (about 2200) checked, verified, and archived (and in the case of the URLs, PURL-ed). I can’t reveal yet which institution is bravely contemplating this task, but an announcement will be forthcoming VERY soon, and if YOUR valiant institution would like to help out in the effort, see me and we can talk.

In January we went live with a page of Frequently Asked Questions about the Electronic Collection and our discovery, archiving, and cataloging activities. Let me encourage you to check the FAQ at

• http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fdlp/ec/faq.html

As a little sidebar to this archiving activity, I want to talk a bit about the best library conference I’ve ever been to. I was fortunate to give a paper (that I wrote with the collaboration of former Transition Specialist Steve Kerchoff) at "Preservation 2000: An International Conference on the Preservation and Long Term Accessibility of Digital Materials" sponsored by the Cedars project in the UK, and held in the north of England at York in early December. In one room were 150 people from libraries across Europe and the US who are making the preservation of digital library materials happen. It was there that I learned about (and got very excited about) LOCKSS, and heard about initiatives at the National Library of Canada, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the Cedars group in the UK, and the National Library of Australia, among others. I learned that our activities compare extremely favorably with those cutting-edge projects. I also learned that the National Library of Australia, whose digital library program is extremely successful, planned their work in much the same pragmatic, seat-of-the-pants way that we have, and are actually using some of the same cheap-but-good software that we are for capturing publications from Web sites.

The proceedings from the conference can be found at <http://www.rlg.org/events/pres-2000/prespapers.html>, and my presentation has appeared in Administrative Notes (v. 22, # 5, 3/15/01).

OK, back to the update. Most of you know that we have been working on various sorts of projects with OCLC, Inc. for the last several years. At the conclusion of the GPO/OCLC/ERIC pilot project, we began talking with them about the part of that project that we felt never got addressed: digital archiving. Through late 1999 and into last year, we worked on developing a high-level requirements document that describes a toolkit for discovering, documenting, saving, storing, and cataloging electronic publications. We are presently at work on an investigative project in which OCLC is prototyping a system to manage all these functions in an integrated environment. It will be based on the CORC interface, with lots of added functionality. OCLC has promised us a first working model by summer. We hosted a site visit by some members of the development team at the big red buildings last week, and it’s safe to say that everybody who participated learned a lot.

The initial prototype will give the staff in DAB a tool for making sure that all the bits and pieces of information that are created and recorded while we’re acquiring a publication are done in a systematic way, and that the information, such as item and class, PURL and originating URL, dates, and all the rest, are turned over into other parts of the process, like archiving and bibliographic control.

The site visit was a real eye-opener for the OCLC project team, most of whom are pretty solidly of the dot-com generation, and who’ve never really come across a production-line setting like ours.

As the project develops, we hope to gain functionality for identifying electronic publications (the part I like to call 21^st century gray bins, in honor of our venerable old GPO sorting bins that help us sort out newly received pubs for classification) for storage on a "vault" server operated by OCLC, and for other activities surrounding the actual download or "harvest" of publications.

The tools that we hope to come out of this project with will support the functions that we’ve had the most trouble with since we began dealing with electronic publications: the acquisitions and classification tasks that are supported by our old mainframe systems, and their interaction with the creation of NET and the FDLP/EC Archive. You’ve heard about our systems modernization efforts from Gil Baldwin earlier this morning, and will hear more detail from Laurie Hall. We’re hopeful that this project will dovetail in nicely.

There is another major project that we’re at work on that I want to report to you about. As you probably know by now, the Census Bureau has (finally) firmed up the dissemination plans for the Census 2000 data products. You’ve been walked and talked through this a number of times already, I’m sure. There will be basic printed reports. All the Summary Files (which correspond to the Summary Tape Files of yore) will be available on disk with accompanying retrieval software (it’s looking like DVD will be the optical medium of choice) and these will be distributed to depositories. In addition, the Summary Files will be available as compressed comma-delimited ASCII files by ftp from Census.gov. This was very welcome news for us because, from a permanent access point of view, the DVDs with proprietary software aren’t very good.

We are now in negotiation with a major academic library depository to establish a partnership in which the ASCII Summary Files will be monitored, downloaded, and archived by the partner. They also hope to develop a front end for using the files. This will be a specifically FDLP effort, and Census is very supportive, since it will help reduce load on their servers and make the data more widely available. We’ll be making a more formal and detailed announcement very soon, as well as looking at other accompanying projects.

I wanted to wrap this update up on a positive note, saying something hopeful and upbeat. It’s a ticklish time for that, since so much of what lies ahead is unclear to us at this point. I can look with some satisfaction over the time I’ve been at GPO and point to some real progress in creating the more electronic FDLP. If you go by the numbers, our numbers are strong. There are many ways to slice and dice that figure of 61%, but the reality is that we’re handling ever-more electronic publications, and finding ways to cope with this transitional period. A lot of our biggest challenges currently are fairly transient in nature, centered on keeping up with our "traditional" work while incorporating the electronic pubs in a way that we feel is consistent with the statutory mandate. We continue to feel that eventually we will see most of the publications in the program disseminated in electronic form. We’re certainly taking as active a stance to accomplish that as we can, but we’re also led to a great extent by the agencies themselves, who continue to buy printing services from GPO.

• GPO Access achieved a record high of over 32 million document retrievals for the month of January 2001.

• GPO Access contains almost 119,000 electronic titles and points to more than 84,000 others, for a total of almost 203,000 titles.

• GPO Access provides use of almost 1,900 databases through more than 80 applications.

• GPO Access received over 500,000 referrals from other Web sites for the month of January. Of these referrals 54% had an undetermined source (the origin of the referral could not be detected by the log program) and, over 30% came from the ".com", ".gov", and ".mil" domains (13.6% ".com", 17.8% ".gov", and < 1% ".mil"). The domains for ".net", ".org", and ".edu" had a combined total of almost 7%, and 2.3% were referred from Federal Depository Libraries. To date, for FY 2001, Federal Depository Libraries have had a cumulative 56,678 referrals with a high of 18,461 referrals in October 2000.

• The Davis-Bacon Wage Determinations application is available at <www.access.gpo.gov/davisbacon/>.

• A summary of the President’s budget plan entitled A Blueprint for New Beginnings – A Responsible Budget for America’s Priorities is available at <www.access.gpo.gov/usbudget/index.html>.

• FY 2002 Economic Outlook, Highlights from 1994 to 2001, FY 2002 Baseline Projections is available at <www.access.gpo.gov/usbudget/index.html>.

• A Public Documents Distribution Centers Page has been added to GPO Access with links to the centers in Laurel, Maryland and Pueblo, Colorado at <www.gpo.gov/puddc/index.html>.

We are constantly looking for valuable feedback to improve the usability of GPO Access. A number of methods are used for this purpose, including focus groups, online surveys, and of course, questions and comments received by the GPO Access User Support Team on a daily basis. In addition to these mechanisms, we have started doing usability testing at usability-testing centers, in order to get immediate feedback on how users find government information on GPO Access. This will provide us with another measure of the effectiveness and efficiency of our site, as well as the satisfaction of users. We recently conducted our first usability study at the Bureau of Labor Statistics lab in Washington, DC. The results were most helpful and will be used in the ongoing development of GPO Access. We are currently trying to recruit hosts for usability testing. If you have a lab or know of an available lab, or are interested in participating in or hosting future usability studies for GPO Access, please contact Jason Humm, Office of Electronic Information Dissemination Services, by phone at (202) 512-2122 or email <jhumm@gpo.gov>.

GPO staff are also undertaking an examination of Section 508 of the Workforce Investment Act, which is meant to increase accessibility for the disabled in the workplace, to determine how it might apply to GPO Access Web pages. In particular, we are looking at how the sixteen Section 508 standards increase accessibility, and how each of these standards might apply to the GPO Access Web site and its hosted sites.

Dublin Core Metadata Elements have been incorporated into the HTML source code of our major Web pages as information resource descriptions. Our goal is to use these elements to help facilitate indexing of GPO Access pages in our site search and in Internet search engines to support consistent use of metadata elements on Web pages. For more information on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, please visit <http://dublincore.org/>.

EIDS is continuing its ongoing process of attempting to achieve higher positioning for GPO Access pages in the search results of major Internet search engines. After conducting research on each search engine examined in the study, it is apparent that paid positioning in search engines is becoming more prevalent. In light of this, EIDS is currently examining measures in regards to paid placement and positioning to improve the ranking of certain pages in major Internet search engines.

Ben’s Guide was recently highlighted in the February, 2001 issue of Skewl Sites newsletter as "a top notch resource to teach many topics related to government." In addition to that honor, Lightspan's StudyWeb featured Ben’s Guide as one of the best educational resources on the Web. The U.S. Government Printing Office is holding the first ever Ben’s Guide focus group on May 9, 2001 in Long Island, New York. The focus group will be held with students from local schools in an attempt to gain feedback about Ben’s Guide from a student’s perspective.

We recently participated in the "Computers in Libraries" conference held from March 14-16 in Washington, DC. We will also be participating in the Medical Library Association 2001 Information Odyssey being held in Orlando, FL from May 26-29, the Annual American Library Association Conference being held in San Francisco, CA from June 14-20 and we will finish up FY 2001 at the American Association of Law Libraries Conference in Minneapolis, MN being held from July 14-19.

• An eCFR application, which will be updated daily as opposed to the current quarterly updated Code of Federal Regulations application, will be available soon.

• As a result of the development of the free eCFR application, the Sales program is developing a new e-mail subscription service and a quarterly CD-ROM subscription service on a fully rendered CD-ROM with a search engine installed program. Customers will be able to purchase subscriptions that will allow them to be notified via e-mail of any changes in one or more CFR titles and/or parts, as they are published in the Federal Register.

• GPO Access is currently researching a subscription service that will allow us to monitor the site’s performance at various times from a user’s perspective. This will allow GPO to gain knowledge about what enhancements should be made to increase the overall performance of GPO Access.