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Government Information Locator Service (GILS): About
The Government Information Locator Service (GILS) is an effort to identify, locate, and describe publicly available Federal information resources, including electronic information resources. GILS records identify public information resources within the Federal Government, describe the information available in these resources, and assist in obtaining the information. GILS is a decentralized collection of agency-based information locators using network technology and international standards to direct users to relevant information resources within the Federal Government.
Because this collection is decentralized, the GPO Access GILS site is only one of several US Federal GILS sites. Thirty-two agencies have mounted their GILS records on the GPO Access server (and are listed individually in the scroll box located on the GILS search page). The GILS records of the other departments and agencies are spread across many sites. For basic information about GILS, visit www.gils.net.
For agencies that mounted their GILS records on a server other than GPO Access, GPO wrote GILS pointer records, to describe their GILS holdings and link to those holdings. GPO sent those pointer records to each agency and invited each to edit its own records as appropriate. Browse Pointer GILS records.
The Government Printing Office partially funded a study entitled, "An Evaluation of the Federal Government's Implementation of the Government Information Locator Service: The Final Report", which is available on GPO Access. This study was completed on June 30, 1997.
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