Justification/Background
At the HathiTrust Constitutional Convention, October 2011, partners gave overwhelming support for a ballot proposal to provide “Expanded coverage & enhanced access to U.S. Government Documents.” The nature of the proposed work will be decided by a group process determined by the Board of Governors, but key elements include:
- Facilitating “collective action to create a comprehensive digital corpus of U.S. federal publications including those issued by GPO and other federal agencies.”
- Coordinating “operational plans and a business model to further and sustain coordinated digitization, ingest, and display of U.S. federal publications including those issued by GPO and other federal agencies.”
- And “that HathiTrust develop a process to implement enhanced access protocols to fully realize the potential of a comprehensive corpus of U.S. federal publications including those issued by GPO and other federal agencies.”
Perhaps the most significant impediment to accomplishing the goal of creating a comprehensive corpus of US federal publications is the absence of a reliable inventory of items in the corpus. In discussions related to digitizing government documents, participants recognize that even the promising inductive strategy of relying on the catalogs of regional depository libraries falls short. Many or perhaps all regional depository libraries have not cataloged their collections comprehensively; records exist at the bibliographic level rather than the volume level (e.g., more than 7,000 volumes corresponded to five bibliographic records submitted by Michigan’s Law Library) ; many US federal government publications are cataloged as serials but are regarded by users and librarians as monographs. In short, the fundamental chaos inherent in this non-inventory has led informed individuals in digitization discussions to produce estimates that range from 1.8m to 2.2m volumes, and to estimate average volume page counts from 60 pages to over 300 pages (a total range with a difference of more than 500m pages). Moreover, the absence of an inventory makes impossible tasks like correlating the more than 400,000 documents currently in HathiTrust with the total corpus, and coordinating collective effort across a group of institutions.
Primary Audience
The library community, government agencies, other organizations and project staff
Purposes
Inform potential digitization projects
Inform potential deaccessioning projects
Inform other collection development and management projects, such as shared print initiatives
Secondary Audience
Researchers/General public
Purposes
Identify materials distributed by a given agency, for research purposes
Identify materials distributed on a given topic, or within a given time period
Identify volumes in a given series, and where they can be found
Constraints
The quality of metadata for US federal materials is inconsistent, which has the potential to lead to false matching and/or metadata duplication
Metadata for federal materials may not yet exist
Assumptions
The registry will include those publications distributed to Federal Depository Libraries as well as other materials created and/or distributed by GPO and other federal agencies
The registry will include materials in languages other than English
The registry will include materials that may be protected by copyright
Metadata will need to be created for some materials
The first phase of the registry project will focus on US federal documents distributed to Federal Depository Libraries. Future phases will address questions such as:
- Should works such as grant-funded or contract work, declassified materials, individual pieces of legislation (bills), administrative publications, and/or data/data sets be included?
Project Updates
- April 2013-April 2014
- May 2014-October 2014
- November 2014-April 2015
- May 2015-October 2015
- November 2015-April 2016
Timeframe
The project has been extended to three years. An updated outline of project milestones is given below:
Phase One - Planning: (April-October 2013) | Status |
Define project scope and initial project plan | Completed |
Identify initial sources of metadata | Completed |
Develop initial list of agency names and variants | Completed |
Determine metadata elements to include | Completed |
Gather community input on proposed functionality | Completed |
Phase Two - Analysis & Requirements - September 2013 - September 2014 | |
Acquire metadata from external sources | In Process - ongoing |
Analyze potential processes for determining duplication among metadata records | Completed |
Analyze potential processes for determining the existence of gaps in the registry | Completed |
Draft functional requirements | Completed |
Phase Three - Development (August 2014-December 2015) | |
Develop processes for determining duplication among metadata records | Completed |
Develop processes for determining the existence of gaps in the registry | Completed |
Build the registry framework | Completed |
Build User Interfaces | Completed |
Test and evaluate internally | Completed |
Provide a public alpha to gather external feedback on use of the registry | Completed |
Incorporate feedback into production system | Completed |
Phase Four - Production/Launch (January-July 2016) | |
Provide a beta for public use | Completed |
Continue to incorporate feedback into the system | In process - ongoing |
Build APIs / make data available for export | On hold |
Conduct assessment based on previously defined success criteria | Completed |
Continue to refine processes for duplicate and gap detection | In process - ongoing |
Develop ongoing processes for maintenance and updating | Completed |