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Government Information
Resources for Librarians
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Government Information
Resources for Librarians
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by Frank Wihbey, Head, Government Publications, Maps, GIS & Microforms
Department
Tri-State Regional Document
Depository
University of Maine, Orono, Maine 04469-5729
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These items are written in terms of our local situation,
but certainly may apply elsewhere in the Tri-State Region of Maine, New
Hampshire and Vermont.
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Other libraries are named here. Most of this information is
derived from publicly available data about them. But honesty requires that I
advise the reader and staff of those libraries that this is all recorded
without their explicit permission. Suggestions for corrections, additions or
deletions are welcome.
When we cannot immediately satisfy a patron request for a government publication but want to help, it is not always as simple as just sending them to Interlibrary Loan. Recommendation for the next steps is a little more complicated than for other publications, so it is much better if we can give prior advice, either to the patron or to ILL. While I have this information in mind due to a recent patron request, I thought I'd organize it in the form of a "referral tree" in order to share it. If anyone has more suggestions, please let me know.
Why Distinguish Between Pre- and Post-December 1963 documents?
We became a Regional (full) Federal Document Depository in December 1963.
Obviously our U.S. document collection is weaker prior to that year
as we selected (as best I can reconstruct it) somewhere between 30-50% of
available depository items since we started (officially in 1907, but less
officially even before that).
However via periodic transfers from the 28 selective depositories in our
tri-state region we have been developing our pre-1964 holdings over the past
45 years, and now hold over 2.3 million federal documents. Please keep in
mind that many of the earlier documents are not reflected yet in our online
catalog URSUS <ursus.maine.edu>.
A thorough search of our Department's manual records (card file and
other) should be done before disappointing a patron.
Prior to July 1, 1976 The Government Printing Office offered a single
cataloging product, the hard-copy Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government
Publications, with monthly and cumulated annual indexes.
(Private organizations produced indexes with larger cumulations, e.g.
Carrolton Press, CIS, Inc.)
On that date they joined OCLC, adopted MARC record format, Library
of Congress Subject Headings, and AACRII standards for forms of corporate
names and bibliographic description.
They also invited other first-tier OCLC members to add to the
records, so classification in LC, Dewey, NLM and other systems, along with
contributions in other MARC fields are included. From then on they upload
all new cataloging to OCLC. However (until just now) there hadn’t been an
interest on GPO's part in retrospective cataloging, so achieving 100% retro
is still a Holy Grail of document librarians.
Based on recent experience the yield in OCLC may now be as high as 75 -
80% due to tireless efforts of member libraries, including us..
Benefitting from this we have an ongoing project of cataloging our
pre-1976 resources, improving access for our patrons and increasing our
transparency for the purpose of interlibrary loans.
Other Strong Collections by a Combination of Depository and Commercial
Sources...
I hope this is not too forward of me to say, but some of the private
colleges have purchased large commercial sets like
the complete Readex depository and non-depository microprint collections,
various CIS, Inc. retrospective collections for Congressional documents
and the like. A search of their
online catalogs is always a good idea, but be aware that they might have the
same cataloging limitations as us. Also
the search tools for such aggregations may be offline or restricted-access
online.
Don’t hesitate to contact their reference librarians as I think we
all routinely trade favors.
I know that we are all depositories and
"we all get the same things." But the actual extents of our
collections of government documents collections go beyond that and may
include many non-depository documents and publications from regional
government offices.
Next level of referral - other Regionals...
In case our Regional collection cannot fill a patron's request, the next
logical step is a regional depository that is even more complete than ours
(there are not that many!) such as the
Boston Public Library, and
Connecticut State Library. I
cannot speak for them, but from my own experience they welcome questions
from other documents librarians. Be sure to mention that you have already
consulted your own Regional Depository first.
Online Document-Related Compendia, Comprehensive Catalogs and Search
Engines...
Efforts to date like
Cybercemetry and the
American Memory Project are of increasing value as they
develop historical depth.
WorldCat and GPO's new
National Bibliography of Government Publications are always good for a try. Each of these
offers search refinement by year(s) and other qualifications.
Even Google searches have some success. Try typing in the first
few words of the title, in quotes, and add site and format qualification as
needed, e.g.
"monthly weather review" 1951
site:gov filetype:pdf
will bring up the text of issues of the old Weather Bureau periodical.
Everybody's digitizing older publications, not just libraries.
So try Google's special government search engine. I was able to find a
pdf of the 1947 Minerals Yearbook in just a few seconds using this.
Next Level of Referral - Federal Agency and Department Libraries, Including
Military...
At this “branch” of the tree, over time I've found the best results by
contacting the pertinent agency or department library listed in the
Directory of federal libraries (Reference Z731 .E93 1993).
Despite its age it is still very useful since information for such
institutions is usually stable and can always be verified on their
respective websites.
American Library Directory is
arranged by state then city, but I caution that the headquarters
libraries of federal agencies are not all in DC.
Some are in MD or VA, etc. Searching
the name index with a focus on an agency name or parent federal department
might help.
Subject oriented lists can be found on the web
The other good strategy is to contact the regional office of the agency, if
there is one. Without fail they
have been friendlier, and require less levels of bureaucracy to wade through
than their parent offices in the DC area.
Many of ours are clustered in Boston.
The following exact search string:
regional
office federal boston OR massachusetts
in the
usa.gov search facility
should capture almost all of them.
Some even have their own libraries.
My recollection is that most are not OCLC members, so it never hurts
to ask if they have a library and if they will lend or photocopy.
(The number and/or usefulness of these is slowly decreasing due to
successive Administrations' mandates to privatize or eliminate information
dissemination. This could change under the new Administration in
Washington.)
Keep in mind that though the following libraries and archives may be able to
help sometimes, they are mission driven and have different rules about
serving the public. (For their
purposes we librarians are considered part of the public!)
The National Archives and Records Service (NARA) is an archive, and not organized for
library-like service. However
they do have a
NARA
regional facility in Waltham, Massachusetts, which is at least closer than DC for our Northern New England patrons. They usually can borrow film copies
from headquarters in College Park, Maryland for on-site use there in
Waltham.
Don’t be put off by the
words “regional facility”, as, in their own right they have very developed
collections. Though Waltham
staff may try to be very helpful, be aware that their mission involves them
well beyond the universe of “government publications”, so they are not an
automatic source for unsatisfied requests. Ask ahead.
As we are often reminded, the Library of Congress serves
Congress first. More
mission-oriented libraries like the
National Library of
Agriculture, the
National Library of
Medicine,
National Library of Education,
National for the
Environment and the
National Transportation Library are better bets for service than the LC.
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