What's Up with Docs?!?: The Peculiarities of Cataloging Federal Government Serial Publications

Abstract

Federal government documents serials possess special features that make them particularly difficult to catalog and manage—from government documents-specific machine-readable cataloging fields and coding to Supervisor of Documents numbers and distinctive enumeration. As electronic documents, they present another set of complex cataloging challenges involving the Government Printing Office's (GPO) single-record approach in the early days of providing access online. This article brings three discrete perspectives to a discussion of these challenges. One perspective is that of a cataloger working at GPO's Library Services & Content Management (LSCM) division who provides a voice from the source. Another perspective is that of a local cataloger who must make government documents’ records conform to the guidelines of the local library's online catalog. The last perspective is that of a Regional Federal Depository Library Coordinator who is responsible for providing access to government information for patrons in a library located at a Carnegie Classified Research I university.