Access the Interim Report (10 pages; PDF)

For this project, Ithaka S+R staff interviewed more than 80 individuals from 30 libraries, the Government Printing Office (GPO), and a number of other key organizations. The FDLP serves a variety of needs across a number of communities, and in this project Ithaka S+R has taken a systemwide perspective in an attempt to understand the needs of all stakeholders. This summary presents a high-level overview of the project’s interim findings and recommendations.

Here are a Few Key Points from the Report:

+ In order to effectively serve user needs, our interviewees emphasized that government information must be made freely available and preserved for the long-term in digital form.

+ The historical print collection must be preserved, even though it will play a significantly reduced role for access by users.

+ To make the rich historical collections useful, they must be digitized comprehensively and at a sufficiently high level of quality.

+ GPO should coordinate the preservation of born-digital government information.

+ FDLP must ensure the integrity and preservation of born-digital and digitized collections, using FDsys as a key platform and aggregator

+ Libraries, non-profits, and vendors should develop new and revamped discovery environments based on the anticipated needs of specific groups of users

+ In this transition, librarians should take on an expanded role as government information librarians rather than government documents librarians

+ For many participating libraries, the services provided by their government information librarians in helping users and other librarians work effectively with this material will be their principal contribution to permanent public access.

Access the Interim Report (10 pages; PDF)

Note: A Final Version of the Report Will Be Released Later this Fall

Source: ITHAKA S+R (via ARL & FGI)

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 and is filed under Government Documents and Political Information, Libraries and Librarianship. 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.