WebJunction

Anne Craig mentioned in her letter to COSLA members that the State of Illinois would like to refocus their state and federal government documents programs on public service rather than curation and collection management. One possible solution Illinois is considering is partnering to migrate the permanent collections of their depository libraries to a digital shared library.

The State of Utah has not done this for federal depository collections, but we have created a digital library for providing permanent public access to born-digital publications at Utah Government Publications Online <http://publications.utah.gov>.

The Utah Academic Library Consortium (UALC) Council created a Government Documents Task Force last fall to make recommendations regarding the future of federal and state documents depositories in Utah. In the task charge that they gave us (attached) they noted increasing user preference for Web access over print documents and the trend of government agencies to publish digitally rather than print. Final recommendations from this task force are due to the Council by May 4, 2009.

I am writing to our members today to find out if they support us working with Illinois and other states in developing a shared methodology and infrastructure for state and federal depository programs to recommend to GPO.

It seems to me that this makes good sense to combine our efforts.

Kind regards,

Ray Matthews

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Government Information Coordinator
Utah State Library Division
RayMatthews@utah.gov
801.715.6752

Attachments:

Government Documents Task Force Charge.doc (35.5k)