This past April Public Printer, Bruce James, asked the Federal Depository Library Council to lead
the effort to draft a vision statement and a plan of action for creating the Federal Depository
Library Program of the 21st century. Under Mr. James’ leadership, which began at the start of
2003, the Government Printing Office has significantly reorganized its management structure and
drafted a new strategic plan. This plan would lead the agency from the Red Brick building on
North Capitol Street with massive printing presses in its basement to a new facility in Arlington
equipped primarily for digital publishing and dissemination of electronic government documents.
While Mr. James took the opportunity to once again reaffirm his commitment to free and
permanent public access to government documents through libraries and the Internet, he was also
steadfast in his belief that GPO needs to move from being a 19th century printing factory to a 21st
century leader in digital information technology. He said that in five years there would be 1000
times more information than there is at present, and in 10 years there would be 5000 times more
information. Ten years from now GPO will be routinely producing and disseminating audio and
video content as well as text. James also stressed that whatever we come up with today will
certainly be different in 10 years given the pace of technological change. “The important thing, in
terms of a plan, is that we need to know that we are moving in the right direction.”
Very few librarians are unappreciative of the incredible advances in access and searching that
digitization has brought us, but many are also aware of the possible draw backs to putting our
information future squarely in cyberspace. Many are not as confident as Mr. James that it is time
to leave the paper behind in the way that our ancestors left horsepower behind in favor of
motorized technology.
It was noted by Mr. James that this Federal Depository Library (FDL) planning effort begins at
least 2 years behind the overall strategic planning at GPO. Whether his commissioning of Council
to draw up a plan for the future of the FDLP will result in a genuine opportunity for the depository
library community to control its own fate, or whether we will in the end be simply carried along by
the swift current of changes already taking place at GPO remains to be seen.
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Council chair Barbie Selby, of the University of Virginia, laid out a timetable. Discussions at this
October conference in Washington would lead to further talks at the Spring 2006 Council meeting
and conference, and result in a final draft vision statement and action plan produced by Council by
May 15, 2006.
Discussions at the conference centered on the 4 main themes of the Council’s draft vision
statement http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fdlp/pubs/dlc_vision_09_02_2005.pdf :
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New roles for FDLs in the non-exclusive digital government information environment
Managing collections and delivering content
Deploying expertise
Adding value
With the publishing of government information directly to the Web, in essence, all libraries can be
government information libraries. GPO is relying on the Web more than it is on Federal
Depository Libraries (FDLs) in its new strategic initiatives. In fact, it is co-opting the FDLs role as
disseminator of government information to the public. Superintendent of Documents, Judy
Russell, now head of the Information Dissemination (ID) branch of GPO, and who was unable to
attend this conference due to a family emergency, had this to say back in April about the changes
at GPO, “This transformation is changing the ways that GPO acquires, preserves and provides
access to government information (emphasis added)…We will continue working with you [the
depository community] on an orderly, but accelerated transition to a digital FDLP. This will
continue to cause depository librarians to transform themselves from managers of collections into
managers of electronic services, a trend that is not limited to government documents.” Both
Council and GPO are encouraging Docs librarians to expand and develop our role and presence as
human search engines. Even in this arena we are not the gatekeepers that we used to be but rather a
last resort. The Public, who wants to be independent, comes to us when Google fails to satisfy its
needs. Rough statistics show 39 million hits per month for GPO Access while FDLs see about
712,000 per month. Listed below are some of the initiatives discussed that would expand and
deploy our expertise to the public, create new roles for documents librarians and add value to
digital documents on the Web:
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A national collaborative reference service. A pilot project, called Government
Information Online, with over thirty FDLs nationwide is currently under way.
http://govtinfo.org/
Collaboration with non-FDLs and reference librarians providing them some training
and encouraging them to access the expertise of the government documents specialist.
Information literacy outreach efforts to the public, teaching high school and college
students and adults critical thinking skills, and ways to include government
information in their reports.
Establish a presence on the Web, perhaps partnering with Google and memory
organizations like the Internet Archive. (There was talk of inviting representatives
from Google to the next Council meeting in April.)
Get Google to expand and bring Google Uncle Sam to the forefront of their efforts.
Librarian created Web Guides on Firstgov, executive agency Web sites, GPO Access
Collaborate with agencies and ask them to provide links to Google Uncle Sam and a
collaborative online reference service
Encourage more librarians to participate in the “Browse Topics” subject index to
government information.
Encourage librarians to look for “fugitive” documents and report them to GPO for
cataloging.
Encourage documents librarians to do information product testing and feed back for
GPO and executive agencies.
Documents librarians should continue to advocate for information issues and policies.
Librarians can help develop new metadata standards
Combine metadata and user tools and finding aids to create small locally oriented
collections of government documents
Deploying Expertise
Council defines deploying expertise as:
 Providing reference services
 Offering government information literacy instruction to the public
 Training other library staff to provide reference services
Initiatives for FDLs in this area were covered above, however GPO’s role, and the role of other
interested parties in deploying the expertise of documents librarians was also considered:
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Training. There was a lot of talk about GPO providing more opportunities for training to
documents specialists and also providing a user-friendly referral system.
GPO could make credits available to libraries as a reward for their public service
programming innovations
Consult with documents specialists when designing information products
Foster a network of experts
Provide internships for students who have been recruited to government documents
librarianship
Managing Collections and Delivering Content:
Digital Deposit of Surrogate Documents
It is clear that the government intends to become a disseminator of government information to the
public, a role traditionally played by the FDLs. Many librarians want digital surrogates on their
servers to increase preservation security, guarantee free and permanent public access and to
eliminate chances for government censorship in the future. The deposit of digital surrogates on
depository libraries’ own servers, would essentially keep the system as it is today, only tweaking it
to accommodate digital requirements.
The LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) pilot project may be a means by which this can
be achieved but GPO remains unclear on their policy position on whether this approach will be
applied across the board to all documents in the FDLP. To date there seems to be reluctance on
the part of GPO to commit to deposit of digital surrogates into willing FDLs. When asked directly
at the end of the conference he seemed a bit evasive, but Mr. James said that GPO is looking at the
technology to make this possible.
GPO is currently using the LOCKSS software system to provide 19 libraries with current volumes
of three Government e-journals over a 12-month pilot project. Whether a successful outcome to
this project would lead to dissemination of all digital documents is unclear, but GPO does seem to
believe that as a whole, its strategic initiatives including the National Bibliography and the
National Collection (with about 10 or less “light” and “dark” paper archives dispersed around the
country) and the developing Future Digital System (FDsys) within which these programs would
run, effectively deal with the difficulties which can arise with tracking, preserving and accessing
Web based content.
Librarians are still concerned that if the information is only available on government servers that it
would be susceptible to censorship when the administration in power finds that certain information
is unsupportive of its position.
Luckily the high costs of establishing digital repositories are being reduced by cost sharing efforts
among academic libraries. There was talk at the conference that FDLP regional libraries of the
future would look like consortia rather than individual libraries. It was also mentioned that
memory organizations such as the Internet Archive might be enlisted to serve as digital
repositories of surrogate documents. However, it is still believed by many that the cost of
establishing digital infrastructures for most libraries will be prohibitive and unsupported by library
administrations.