Documents to the people access through the automated catalog

Abstract

Poor bibliographic control of government publications has plagued the depository library system almost from its inception. Government publications in depository libraries have been grossly underutilized, because they have not been listed in the libraries' public access catalogs. When GPO made its bibliographic records available on machine readable tapes in 1976, documents librarians expected that the era of uncataloged documents collections was over and that the new technology would permit documents to be listed in public access catalogs. The promise of the GPO/MARC tapes has remained largely unfulfilled—problems with the tapes have prevented libraries from taking advantage of this cost-effective way to acquire full cataloging for U.S. government publications. From 1987 to 1989, documents librarians at Louisiana State University, Rice University, and Texas A & M University were engaged in a project that will reverse the situation. Working with a commercial vendor, the librarians made major corrections to the records on the GPO/MARC tapes. This article provides details of the measures taken to clean up the retrospective tapes and to make them available to depository libraries.