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

The fall 1999 meeting of the Depository Library Council will be held in Kansas City, Missouri, from Monday, October 18 through Thursday morning, October 21. A one-half day Regional librarians’ meeting is scheduled on Tuesday afternoon, October 19. The Hotel Phillips, formerly the Radisson Suite Hotel, is the meeting site. A block of rooms at $88 per night single, $98 double, $108 triple, and $118 quad is being held for Council attendees. This rate is guaranteed for guests arriving three (3) days prior to the meeting and for the three (3) days following the meeting. To receive this rate, you must register with the hotel no later than September 17, 1999. After the cut-off date, rooms will be subject to space availability at the prevailing rate. Please specify the Government Printing Office (GPO) when you contact the hotel.

To register, call the reservation desk at (816) 221-7000. The hotel address is:

Nonsmoking rooms are available on request. Indoor valet parking in the hotel garage is $10 per day with unlimited access. An alternative is the city garage, one (1) block away. That daily fee is $7 with one in and one out.

If you are unable to register via the Web, please fill out the form below.

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Two "hands on" training sessions at individual computer workstations will be held for depository librarians attending the fall Depository Library Council meeting in Kansas City, Missouri. The morning session, from 8:30 a.m. to 12 noon, is geared toward those with little familiarity with GPO Access. This basic class will introduce GPO Access including using PDF files and general search strategies for such databases as the Federal Register, Congressional Record, etc.

The afternoon session, from 2:00 – 5:00 p.m., is geared to those who already use GPO Access and will provide advanced search techniques on tracing legislation and regulations. Depository librarians may sign up for one but not both sessions.

The training site is 15-20 minutes away by taxi or trolley. Registrants are responsible for their own transportation.

Seating is limited to 20 per session on a first come, first served basis. Registration must be received by October 1, 1999. To reserve a seat, contact Sheila McGarr by either:

1. Fax: (202) 512-1432, or
2. E-mail: smcgarr@gpo.gov

GPO will verify the registration and maintain a waiting list in case of cancellations.

The Library Programs Service (LPS) is interested in increasing participation from depository librarians in developing and maintaining the Pathway Services "Browse Topics" page at: <www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/dpos/pathbrws.html >.

If you are interested in developing a Topic, or have some other specific area of expertise on a Topic, please contact James Mauldin, who is now responsible for coordinating Pathway Services. Mr. Mauldin will explain what is involved in developing and maintaining a Topic, or in updating an existing Topic. Further information on contributing to Pathway's "Browse Topics" effort may be found under "An Invitation to Contribute" at: <www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/dpos/topics/invite.html >.

Current contributors should submit their quarterly updates directly to James Mauldin for review and upload.

James Mauldin can be contacted at <jmauldin@gpo.gov>.

GPO will rebind the recently distributed defective parts for volume 142 of the bound Congressional Record (item 0993-A-01, X 1.1:). The defective parts are 5, 7, 8, 11, and 13.

To have their copies rebound, libraries must return the defective volumes to LPS by September 15, 1999. LPS sent mailing labels to selecting depositories in August, along with instructions on returning the materials. The defective copies will be rebound and returned to the libraries by November 30, 1999.

Greetings! I’m pleased to be here with such a large group of friends and colleagues to provide an update on the Superintendent of Documents government information dissemination programs. I’ll touch on a number of issues, but other GPO staff will be sharing additional reports with you today and tomorrow and interacting in various committee meetings.

To start, I would like to highlight some important personnel changes that have occurred since I last spoke to you in Philadelphia.

Sheila McGarr has been appointed to serve as Chief of the Library Division. Many of you know Sheila through her recent responsibilities, which have included organizing both the annual Federal Depository Conferences and the Interagency Depository Seminars in addition to supervising our team of library inspectors. Others of you, no doubt, met her when she served as a library inspector in the early to mid 1980’s. I’m sure you’ll want to wish Sheila well in this position.

George Barnum from Case Western Reserve University will be completing a two year stint as a member of the Electronic Transition Staff (ETS) in mid-July. I would like to take this opportunity to thank George for his diligent efforts on behalf of the depository program and especially for his work on Managing the FDLP Electronic Collection: A Policy and Planning Document, that was released last October.

Our other ETS member, Judy Andrews, from James Madison University has been reappointed for a second year. She will continue examining and evaluating electronic products for inclusion in the Electronic Collection.

We have asked Steve Kerchoff from the Library of Congress’ Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC) to join ETS for the coming year. There are, however, some procedural issues that need to be ironed out before we can bring him on board. Steve would bring a great deal of knowledge about Federal libraries and information resources and would be able to make a major contribution to the program.

In addition, Sheila asked me to let you know that Library Programs Service (LPS) is seeking another library inspector. The job announcement can be found on the GPO and Office of Personnel Management Web sites and has also been posted on GOVDOC-L and LAWLIB. If you have specific questions about the position, feel free to check with Sheila or Gil Baldwin here at the conference.

As many of you have heard, an Electronic Collection Manager is being sought within LPS. Applications for that position were due to GPO in mid-June. Advertised nationally, we expect to have a selection made later this year. The establishment of this position is an action item in our electronic collection plan and we are pleased to see this idea on the way to becoming a reality.

What are all these people and the rest of the staff doing? Why are they needed? Well, we’re moving ahead on many fronts to make government information products available and as readily accessible as possible to all. We’re collecting, cataloging, classifying, distributing, providing training, support, and outreach. None of these processes is simple or easy. But we are accomplishing a lot in all these areas.

There are reports on various activities in Library Programs Service in the handout. I’d like to highlight some of the issues and supplement the report with comments on additional programs and projects.

Those of you in depository libraries will know that we are fairly consistent with last year, at this same time, in distribution of materials. We do, however, continue to see a drop in the number of tangible publications as GPO and Federal agencies make the transition to a more electronic environment. At the end of May ’98, we had distributed more than 8,400 paper titles; as of May ’99, that number was down over 1,000 to 7,300. CD-ROM distribution has decreased somewhat from close to 570 a year ago to 430 at the end of May, and microfiche titles are up from approximately 17,000 to close to 18,000.

We are currently sending approximately 19 percent paper; 45% microfiche and 35% online. CD-ROMs constitute a little over 1% in distribution. We have begun distribution of National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) maps directly from GPO to regularize that process. In addition, LPS staff went to Denver to meet with staff from the U.S. Geological Survey in order to improve their map distribution.

We are working actively to capture publications in all formats for the FDLP and Sales Program. In the Depository Administration Branch update, Robin Haun-Mohamed comments on the process for follow-up on reports of fugitive documents. She also mentions the Inspector General audit of the publications program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH Research Institutes have a statutory waiver from printing through GPO, but not from depository library or cataloging and indexing requirements. 78% of the sampled publications which should have been provided to the FDLP were not. We plan to call this report to the attention of other agencies to encourage greater compliance.

I’d like to comment on our more active program of outreach and training. Of course we are continuing our program of inspection visits, which have a heavy consultative component. In the last 6 months, there have been 53 library inspections in a number of states, including Texas, Kentucky and Missouri. In addition, the inspection staff completed 117 self-study evaluations.

Since January, we have exhibited at a variety of conferences: ALA Midwinter, Computers in Libraries in Arlington, VA, the American Bar Association Technology Show in Chicago, the Association of College and Research Libraries in Detroit, the National Online Meeting in New York and the Special Libraries Association, a few weeks ago, in Minneapolis. We are planning now for next year’s schedule and we would like to reach out to additional user groups. Staff from the Office of Electronic Information Dissemination Services (EIDS) have conducted 11 GPO Access training sessions and demos in 6 cities: Washington, DC., Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis and Bozeman, MT. And there is training scheduled for this coming Wednesday, June 30 at Tulane University.

Personally, I have been on the road doing presentations about the program to various library groups in Michigan, at the University of Maryland, and the at Department of Energy in Oak Ridge, TN. Most recently, actually early last week, I traveled to Montana where I had the pleasure of appearing on a panel with Julie Wallace, from the University of Minnesota, at the Montana Library and the Mountain Plains Library Associations annual meeting. We discussed government information from perspectives inside and outside the Beltway.

Back inside the Beltway, I’ve spoken to the District of Columbia Library Association, the DC Chapter of the Special Libraries Association, the Federal Publishers Committee and the Interagency Council on Printing and Publishing.

An example of the networking benefits from these meetings was a contact with the Printing Officer from the Department of State from whom I learned of their plans to discontinue publishing the Background Notes on Countries of the World. They were planning only to put them on the Internet and were going to suggest that the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) reprint them on demand. I explained that we had the capability and desire to do that for items in demand in hard copy for the GPO Sales Program. As a result, we have developed an Interagency Agreement to download and print official copies of the Background Notes for both the Sales and Depository programs.

In the last month I’ve had meetings with Ron Lawson, Director of NTIS, and Gary Bachula, Acting Undersecretary of the Department of Commerce for Technology Administration in order to discuss the role and relationships between GPO and NTIS. Thus far those discussions have been on a general, philosophical level in which I’ve been articulating public access concerns. I’ve used the NTIS/Northern Light Technology fee-based gov.search service proposal and the NTIS fee-based bibliographic database and report collection as examples of problems.

My personal perspective is that the gov.search service was presented inappropriately and incorrectly as "the most comprehensive, useful, powerful, and incisive way to locate government information." They claimed that the new Web site would provide one-stop shopping for all federal government resources. In reality, this should have been marketed as an added-value fee-based service with enhanced searching capabilities, complementing many other sites for access to government information. And, in fact, it does not index all federal Web sites since a number, including GPO Access, do not permit Web-crawling robots which slow response times, into their sites.

As I said to Mr. Lawson and Mr. Bachula, we need to coordinate, cooperate, and communicate more, and present a complete picture of the various systems of free and fee-based access to electronic government information to users. In addition, the NTIS bibliographic database should be provided for free public access at depository libraries. Furthermore, depository libraries should have access to the fugitive documents in the NTIS collection.

In regard to our own electronic information services, we were quite pleased that the policy and planning document that will guide the Federal Depository Library Program Electronic Collection was named to the list of "Notable Government Documents" for 1998. The article in the May 15 issue of Library Journal notes that "we are fortunate to have (the) Policy and Planning Document as one of our selections this year. It puts the (depository) program in context and clarifies its commitments…" The author goes on to say that: "It is a valuable tool for librarians facing collection of and service decisions for electronic products."

In furtherance of the permanent public access recommendations in the plan, Gil Baldwin, Don Ladd, GPO Production Manager, and I have just had a meeting with Dr. Lew Bellardo, Deputy Director of the National Archives and Records Administration, to discuss cooperative endeavors, and we will soon be expanding those discussions to encompass representatives of national libraries, federal agencies, and others.

In that same Notable Government Documents article there were some very kind words about our Web site:

The author goes on to say that "GPO Access is promoted by training nationwide and at depository libraries and also by the Access User Support Team (yes, real people)." T.C. Evans will talk about GPO Access in more detail shortly.

I must mention the GPO Sales Program, where there is much happening due to changing government publishing practices, both in quantity and format, changing customer purchasing patterns, and increasing competition for products and markets from other government sales programs and the private sector. The fact that we and other government agencies put some of the sales publications on the Web for free access, including our traditional best sellers such as the Federal Register, Congressional Record, Code of Federal Regulations and Commerce Business Daily, is undercutting the market, especially for people who have only occasional reference use of the publications. In addition we are seeing even more republishing of government information products by the private sector. By law GPO is required to make its printing plates, negatives or tapes available for purchase by private publishers at cost to encourage the further dissemination and reuse of government information. We are experiencing a 16% decline in orders and a decrease of over 20% in the number of individual publications and subscription copies sold. As a result our prices will be increasing to recover expenses.

Having said that, let me tell you about a few new popular interest titles in the program that illustrate the efforts we are undertaking in the sales program:

Microsoft Antitrust Materials -- At the request of the Justice Department and the court, we are publishing the depositions taken in the Microsoft antitrust case on CD-ROM for $52. In addition, they will be available in print on demand and on videotape.

The Cox Report -- This report on Chinese intelligence activities and American nuclear secrets was so popular we sold out of our initial printing. We are reprinting in black and white rather than the original 4-color process to control costs, to ensure that this important document is available for sale.

NIMH Publications -- Two new publications from the National institute of Mental Health; a booklet on schizophrenia and Science on Our Minds, a kit containing brief articles on various mental health topics are both being purchased directly from NIMH’s printers for the Sales Program at NIMH’s request.

NOAA Diving Manual -- The GPO Sales Program will purchase a limited number of this publication from NTIS. NTIS, NOAA and Best Publishers, a private firm, are publishing the Manual as a joint venture.

Federal Aviation Regulations -- To provide their continued availability in print, Sales will assume the copy preparation and printing costs for 20 Federal Aviation Regulations subscriptions in cooperation with the FAA, which was discontinuing printing as an economy move and planned to rely only on Internet access.

We’ve implemented our program for retention of Government Information Products of Historical Significance in the Sales Collection. Currently, there are close to 530 publications declared historical in content. The Sales Management staff will continue to review the current sales inventory to identify publications of long-term historical significance to add to this existing list. We’ve had input from members of the Depository Library Council and depository librarians in the development of the policy and procedures as well as the initial list of appropriate publications.

I want to briefly report that the Integrated Processing System -- IPS -- is well along in terms of software readiness. We are in the process of obtaining printing software in order to produce mailing labels. Staff is also in the final stages of resolving functional issues with our contractor, Northrup Grumman. In other words, we want to ensure that they provide what they are supposed to under terms of the contract and that everything works the way it is supposed to before we go live, hopefully at the end of the summer.

I’d like to conclude by saying this is an exciting time to be at GPO as we develop and evolve our systems to ensure permanent public access to as comprehensive a collection of government information products in all formats as possible. We have a number of staff here who can listen to your ideas and concerns. Many of them will be at GODORT sponsored programs over the next few days. You can also track some of them down at our booth in the exhibit hall. Please come see us!

The Current and Future State of GPO Access
Remarks by T.C. Evans

Acting Director, Office of Electronic Information Dissemination

It is a pleasure to have another opportunity to update the library community on the current and future state of GPO Access. It seems incredible that five months have passed since we got together in Philadelphia, but far less so when you consider all that has changed on GPO Access since that time. The recovery periods between heart-pounding spurts on this electronic Government information roller-coaster seem to be shortening to the point that it is becoming one long bobsled run, racing at breathtaking speed without respite. Angus Grossart once stated that he had "a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom." That being the case, he would have loved GPO Access.

This pace certainly cries for a word of thanks to all of the people at GPO who make GPO Access a reality and for you in the library community as well. The time and effort put in by documents librarians to help users find and use the resources of GPO Access and to let us know how to make it more useful is deeply appreciated.

These efforts are paying off both in terms of utility to our users and attention for the site. We are proud to have been selected as the first recipient of the American Association of Law Libraries Public Access to Government Information Award. Darcy Kirk, AALL Government Relations Committee Chair stated that: "The GPO Access system meets and exceeds criteria established for this award in every respect." In a recent article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, GPO was one of the Web sites listed as having the highest percentage of visitors who are there for work reasons. This was particularly pleasing since GPO Access wasn’t listed in other articles describing research results on the most visited Government sites. It makes me wonder why users are visiting these other sites.

There are now more than 1,200 official Government databases available on GPO Access. These databases contain over 100 gigabytes of data and the total is growing daily. In addition, thousands of other Government information products are accessible through GPO Access. In fact, the most recent count showed that over 143,000 electronic titles are available through the FDLP Electronic Collection, with some 97,000 on GPO servers and slightly more than 46,000 linked to from GPO Access.

This total is continuing evidence of the transition to a more electronic FDLP. The number of electronic titles has grown by almost 15,000 in the first eight months of FY 1999 and will continue to expand as more content is added to our servers, additional partnerships are achieved, and more titles on other sites are bibliographically controlled and linked from our site. This represents growth of more than 11 percent for two thirds of the year, or approximately 1.4 percent per month.

GPO Access usage continues to increase. The implementation and refinement of the BigIP server controller array has both balanced server load and improved response times. Over the past four months an average of more than 20 million documents have been downloaded per month. Over 335 million documents have been downloaded from GPO Access since it began operation in 1994. At the current rate, approximately 220 million documents will be downloaded this fiscal year alone. To place this in context, an average of 8 documents are downloaded from GPO Access every second of every day.

Our busiest time of day is the hour from 11:00 a.m. EST to noon, but there is traffic around the clock on GPO Access. Traffic starts building at about 7:00 a.m., peaks just before noon, remains steady until just after 5:00 p.m., and then gradually tails off to midnight. The busiest days are Tuesday through Thursday, followed by slower Mondays and Fridays, and the slowest days, Saturday and Sunday.

System performance has improved and should continue to improve as the implementation of our server controller array is completed. The size and complexity of the GPO Access system has presented some challenges to this implementation, but our Production department and F5 Technologies have worked hard to get the job done while still providing systems access. It would be difficult to give you an exact date for completion of this effort, but I can assure you that it is receiving the highest possible priority.

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

• The eagerly awaited Site Search capability prototype is available for examination at the booth. While further refinements will be made as we go along, this application will be available in some form when you return from this conference. [The completion of the site search mechanism has unfortunately been delayed by on-going efforts to provide the best possible index and by the demands of preparing for Y2K.—ed.] I would like to thank all of the people who are working long hours to edit the code in GPO Access pages with the tagging necessary to create the most effective index of the products and services available to users. For anyone who thought that it would be easy to create a useful index of the thousands of pages that make up GPO Access, let me just say that it isn’t. Please stop by Booth 1867 to get a demo of this exciting new feature and let us know what you think. When it is fully released, you will be searching an index of all of the HTML pages on GPO Access, augmented with metatagging designed to help focus your search, pinpointing the GPO Access pages pertaining to your area of interest. It is important to note that the index does not extend to the databases themselves. For applications with browse features the Site Search will produce results that link directly to items in the databases. One example of this would be the browseable daily table of contents from the Federal Register. If what you are searching for is listed in one or more day’s table of contents, those pages will be returned as relevant results. Since they contain live links to each of the notices listed for that day, you can then retrieve the actual notices. Another example would be the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Because the CFR offers a browse titles feature, when using the site search for specific regulations within CFR titles, the actual html title, chapter or section page will appear in your results list, depending on your search terms. For example, if you are searching for "flectol h", using site search, the browseable html page containing a link directly to the CFR section titled "Flectol H", will be contained in the results list. Keep in mind, however, that site search will not search within the actual document titled Flectol H.

• The enhanced and restructured pages for our Sales Program have been available since April. Now known as the Online Bookstore, this area of GPO Access has made it much easier to locate and purchase publications for sale. Software has been successfully implemented that provides an encrypted secure environment to enter payment information through GPO Access when purchasing sales products. This new enhancement and the redesigned Online Bookstore have resulted in an increase in the number of sales orders being submitted online, as well as the number of orders printed from the Online Bookstore and sent in through traditional channels.

• A comprehensive Privacy and Security Notice has been completed and added to GPO Access. This notice is now available off of the main GPO Access page and will soon be linked from all high-level pages.

• A browseable catalog of Congressional Bills was released in May. This new feature has proven popular with a vocal segment of our user community who wanted the ability to scan through Congressional Bills without having to perform a search.

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:

• A number of enhancements are being readied for the CFR and FR applications. For instance, a project is underway to add live links to FR notices as deemed appropriate by the agencies publishing notices. One example of this innovation will be to allow publishing agencies to include a live link to their sites so that the public can provide feedback on proposed rules electronically.

• Browse features are being readied for both Congressional Reports and Documents.

• A new GPO Access user survey is being prepared and details on participation will be released in the near future.

Once again, I urge you to stop by the GPO booth and see the additions and changes to GPO Access. As always, I want to thank you for your feedback and I look forward to discussing your ideas for a better GPO Access during the conference.