Detecting US Federal Documents to Expand Access
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This paper reports on HathiTrust’s Federal Documents Program, which facilitates collective action to create a comprehensive digital collection of United States government publications issued by the Government Printing Office and other agencies. Most government information is now produced and distributed digitally, but US research libraries, especially those that participate in the Federal Depository Library Program, hold large numbers of historical print publications that are difficult to discover, find, and use. In June 2016 HathiTrust held over 700,000 items identified as federal documents, but we know this to be only a fraction of what exists. Because of varied cataloging practices we have limited understanding of the number of federal documents at the title level, as well as the corresponding number of volumes, the number of pages, and their distribution across libraries in North America. All of these are important details necessary to plan comprehensive mass digitization of federal documents. A major component of HathiTrust’s program has been the development of the US Federal Documents Registry, envisioned as a reliable inventory of items published at the expense of the US government. The methodology employed for the Registry’s development includes extensive comparative bibliographic analysis, based upon more than 20 million records submitted by 40 libraries in response to a request from HathiTrust. This paper describes methods of de-duplication, relationship-detection, and record consolidation. While many potential use cases exist for such a registry, its primary role is as a tool for identification of materials to be digitized among HathiTrust member libraries and in partnership with other agencies and groups.
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. The mission of HathiTrust is defined in its organizational bylaws, found online at https://www.hathitrust.org/bylaws.
. All ten universities within the University of California are included here. The members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation in 2008 were the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, the Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
. This meeting, known as the Constitutional Convention, is documented at https://www.hathitrust.org/constitutional_convention2011.
. The text is quoted from the original proposal presented at the Convention, found online at https://www.hathitrust.org/constitutional_convention2011_ballot_proposals#proposal4.
. Founded in 1813, the FDLP (http://www.fdlp.gov) became the responsibility of the Government Printing Office (GPO) in 1895, and now includes over 1,100 members.
. Quoted from the HathiTrust Bylaws.
. Government Documents Initiative Planning and Advisory Working Group. “A Status Report and Set of Recommendations for Continued Action on Building a Comprehensive Collection of U.S. Government Documents in the HathiTrust Digital Library,” page 5, October, 2014. The rest of the paragraph summarizes observations found on the same page of the report.
. The text of the Call for Records, along with an FAQ, is available at https://www.hathitrust.org/usgovdocs_call-for-records.
. A complete list of contributing institutions is available at https://www.hathitrust.org/usdocs_registry/about.
. An estimated 5 million of the 26 million contributed records were excluded, as the information contained in those records is too minimal to interpret.
. HathiTrust performs this analysis on all items deposited into its repository in order to determine the copyright and view status of the work. It is documented at https://www.hathitrust.org/bib_rights_determination.
. Specifications for the print holdings data collected by HathiTrust are found at https://www.hathitrust.org/print_holdings.
. These additional use cases are documented at https://docs.google.com/document/d/18fR-lpoTGbBpsXHFnSQspiQcuMHhW4OzKpvZnz3UfA0/edit.