From a Letter to Sen. Charles Schumer and Sen. Robert Brady (2 pages; PDF)

On behalf of the American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), we are writing to express our strong support for a project that will digitize our nation’s historical public domain government works and make these broadly available to the American public. The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) will soon seek the approval of the Joint Committee on Printing to undertake this important public access project at no cost to the government. We request your strong and immediate support of this initiative.

For over 140 years, the GPO, through the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), has made government information available at no cost to the public. In order to ensure that there is effective, permanent, no-fee access to these valuable government documents in electronic formats, GPO is working with other entities to digitize the legacy documents collection. This collection of over 2.2 million documents once digitized will vastly improve public access to these historical and cultural resources of our nation and importantly, preserve this deteriorating resource. Many of the volumes in this legacy collection are brittle due to age and publication on acidic paper. It is our understanding that GPO will receive from the awardee of this no-fee contract, the unaltered digitized files that GPO will then preserve and use to create access files within GPO’s Future Digital System
(FDSys).

Source: Association of Research Libraries

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 and is filed under Digitization Projects, Government Documents and Political Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.