ADMINISTRATIVE NOTES Newsletter of the Federal Depository Library Program Vol. 18, no. 05 GP 3.16/3-2:18/05 March 15, 1997 Electronic Transition Staff Update Remarks by Duncan Aldrich Electronic Transition Staff Library Programs Service U.S. Government Printing Office GODORT Federal Documents Task Force American Library Association Midwinter Meeting Saturday, February 15, 1997 Washington, DC Good morning. As you know, I am currently the team leader of the Electronic Transition Staff (ETS), of the Library Programs Service (LPS) at GPO. Our mission is to work with other GPO staff to plan and implement a successful transition of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) into the electronic age. What I would like to discuss this morning are the specific projects in which my ETS colleagues (Lee Morey, Joe Paskoski and Sandy Schwalb) are involved. These projects can be divided into four general categories: 1) pathway services 2) partnerships 3) FDLP Administration pages on GPO Access, and 4) sundry other projects that seem to absorb lots of time and attention (Sort of like the other duties as assigned in many of your job descriptions) I will actually discuss these beginning with the last category, sundry projects as assigned. 1. SUNDRY PROJECTS AS ASSIGNED USDA Digital Publications: Creating a Preservation Action Plan One interesting project I am involved in is GPO's co-sponsorship of a working conference to plan for the preservation of U.S. Department of Agriculture information in digital formats. The meeting, scheduled for March 2-4, is being jointly sponsored by GPO, the National Library of Agriculture, Cornell University's Mann Library, the Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, and the Farm Bureau. GPO will be sending three staff members to the conference: Gil Baldwin, T.C. Evans and me. The Superintendent of Documents will be one of the key speakers. We have decided to participate in the USDA conference for two reasons. First, GPO will have the opportunity to share with conference participants GPO's plans and concerns regarding permanent public access to digital Government information products, both USDA products and products government wide. Second, GPO staff attending the meeting will be involved for two days in an intense discussion on preserving digital USDA information -- this discussion will address the major issues associated with digital preservation that GPO is itself currently exploring in its own planning for permanent access. Department of Energy Reports in Electronic Format As many of you know, on September 30, 1996, the Department of Energy (DOE) stopped distributing microfiche of between 12,000-15,000 reports from its Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) to the FDLP. Since early October, OSTI has been delivering to GPO a single image file of each report rather than sending fiche directly to the 200 plus libraries that select the reports. GPO staff continue to examine various avenues through which to make the enormous number of DOE reports available through the FDLP. We learned in January that a new director of OSTI came on board, so we have decided to contact him to discuss the continued partnership between GPO and DOE and alternatives for making the DOE reports available. At a meeting last week, Sandy Schwalb, who has been working on the DOE/OSTI project, had an opportunity to run into the new director of OSTI, Dr. Walter Warnick. She mentioned that GPO staff is interested in talking with him and I am pleased to report that we have a meeting set up between Dr. Warnick and Wayne Kelley, set for early in March. We plan to reopen some of the questions we have raised with DOE/OSTI staff over the past several months about how best to make this information available. So where are these reports now? The truth is, the DOE situation has been a very hard nut to crack--but we continue to brainstorm. We can hopefully soon have at least a short term solution to announce. Interagency Agreement with NCLIS In mid-December, Rep. Bill Thomas, then Chairman of the Joint Committee on Printing (JCP), formally approved GPO's proposed Assessment of Standards for Creation and Dissemination and Permanent Access of Electronic Government Information Products. This assessment is, give or take a little for the passage of time, the assessment of standards that was recommended in the draft Transition Plan GPO published last January. The assessment will be conducted by the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) as per an Interagency Agreement approved by the Joint Committee on Printing. LPS staff , including Sandy Schwalb, who is the staff contact person for the assessment, have met with the Executive Director of NCLIS, Peter Young, on a number of occasions as he prepares to select a contractor to produce a Statement of Work which will define how the assessment will be carried out. Once the statement of work is completed, a contractor will be selected to perform the assessment according to the statement of work. Peter Young will be here later this morning to provide a brief overview of the assessment and where NCLIS is in the planning process. A summary of the Interagency Agreement between GPO and NCLIS is available in the back of the room. 2. FDLP ADMINISTRATION PAGES With Joe Paskoski in the lead, ETS continues to work with Robin Haun-Mohamed's Depository Administration staff to enhance and expand upon pages on GPO Access which assist depository librarians in the ongoing administration of their collections. At this time the FDLP Administration site contains most major LPS publications and the FDLP Administration Web site has been redesigned with a new banner for each page and a more user friendly, space saving main page. Several Examples The Item Lister is now live, out of test mode, and allows individuals to enter a depository library number and create an online list of the depository's current item numbers. We have already received a few suggestions on how to enhance Item Lister. Suggestions are always welcome. On another project we are working on the creation of a Web form system that will allow depositories to amend their item number selections on the Web. From the LPS perspective this is a great product, for as well as providing libraries a convenient mechanism for amending item selections, it saves the Depository Administration Branch staff many hours of keyboard work. An interesting side effect of this project is that it has brought together staff from various divisions of GPO. Hopefully additional projects will derive from this current cooperative effort. The tentative target for completion of this project is May, 1997, in time to incorporate this product into the annual selection update cycle. And a quick note. A new WWW page being developed at the recommendation of the Depository Library Council will be the Depository Library Council's home page. Parts of this have begun trickling in from Susan Dow and these should soon be pieced together and hosted on the GPO server. 3. PARTNERSHIPS Shipping Lists Probably the best news at this time regarding the FDLP Administration page is that the shipping list project is now live. This project, which came about as an agreement with the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Texas at Arlington to collaborate with LPS on a shipping list service, provides a great segue into the discussion of partnerships. This is the first FDLP partnership that is oriented toward providing services to assist librarians in their daily depository collection management. GPO is pleased to be working with David Nuzzo at Buffalo and Allen Bell in Texas on this project. Their skills and dedication, along with the cooperation and work of LPS staff, take advantage of new electronic technologies to enhance FDLP capabilities. We hope to initiate similar service oriented partnerships in the future. We refer to these sorts of partnership in which enhanced services are provided to help in the administration of library collection as service partnerships. A second type of partnership is also being developed which involves partnering to provide access to Government information products held by FDLP libraries for remote access. I refer to these as content partnership to reflect the fact they provide remote access to the actual content of information products. UIC DOS GPO Memorandum of Understanding I have been working with John Shuler of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and Colleen Hope, Director, Office of Public Communication at the Department of State (DOS), to establish the first content partnership with a depository library in which the library makes a particular Federal Government information product available for access through the program. What has emerged is a proposed three-way partnership between GPO, UIC and DOS. Both John Shuler and Colleen Hope have tentatively agreed in principle upon a draft copy of a three-way memorandum of understanding establishing a partnership under which UIC will hold for permanent access electronic information products that migrate off the Department of State's Web site. As UIC will be acting as an FDLP partner, this partnership effectively captures these information products for permanent access through the FDLP. The draft memo of understanding is currently has been forwarded to the Joint Committee on Printing for their approval. When approved by JCP, it will be sent to UIC and DOS. 4. PATHWAY SERVICES SUITE Browse Topics Yet another way the skills of the depository library community are contributing to the FDLP is through the Browse Topics Pathway Service that Lee Morey of ETS coordinates. Browse Topics is basically a Web based version of the Subject Bibliographies series familiar to depository librarians. I am happy to announce that eleven librarians have responded to our open invitation to adopt a topic. As I look at this project it seems to me an ideal starting point for new professionals to get a bit of recognition, or for librarians learning to develop their own Web pages to have a project on which they can hone their skills. As you will see on the handout in the back, which is the first page submitted by one of our volunteers, credit is clearly given to the individual who develops and maintains the page. Thanks to Phillip Slatterly for volunteering this. Lee Morey has also been working on the Pathway Indexer. The new server is up and running and the service works remarkably better. On its last wander through the Internet the Indexer visited 809 Government Internet servers and collected 49,112 objects. An addition to Pathway Services we are considering, but which is only in the talking phase, would be called something like Browse Federal Agencies. This page would provide a list of all Federal agencies and subagencies having Web sites, and link users to those sites. We realize that several librarians have done some excellent work along these lines, so we see this as a possible opportunity for partnering. I will be seeking input you might have on the Browse Agencies idea. Conclusion As you can see, ETS has been quite active in the partnering arena. As Federal agencies continue their migration toward producing materials in electronic formats, GPO, through LPS and ETS, will continue its push to ensure that the FDLP obtains these Government information products. Finally, on a more personal note--can we talk? For me this past seven months has been a remarkable opportunity to see how things really work in GPO, and in DC in general. While there has been a lot of hard work, and there are some ups and downs, the work that I have been involved in has for the most part been exceptionally interesting. GPO is currently looking for someone to replace me--no, I'm not being terminated. I would encourage anyone who has a glimmer of an interest to talk with Jay Young or Gil Baldwin, or with Sandy Morton-Schwalb or me about the positions. Sandy, who is making faces at me in the back, will also be winding down her GPO tour this summer. Her position is also being filled. Thank you.