GovInfo provides free public access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government.
Search U.S. Government Publishing Office’s Catalog of U.S. Government Publications for catalog records. Many records link to the full text.
All FDLP Resource Guides are open educational resources for anyone to share, copy, and reuse.
We launched this resource as a portal to provide information and news about the ongoing work of the Metadata and Collection Services (MCS) staff, our initiatives, and our projects and major developments in the cataloging/metadata field that impact access to U.S. Federal Government publications.
We ask that you please send questions and suggestions to MCS by submitting an inquiry in the Cataloging/Metadata (Policy and Records) category via askGPO.
A new webcast, "LSCM GitHub Repositories Webcast Series – American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian (AIANNH) Subject-Based Resources," is now available for viewing.
Visit FDLP Academy for access to FDLP educational and training resources. All are encouraged to share and re-post information about these free training opportunities.
We posted the 4,490 House and Senate bills and resolutions introduced from September 2023 through March 2024 on GitHub. These records contain OCLC numbers and Superintendent of Documents classification numbers but not FDLP item numbers. The records are available in OCLC and the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP).
The records are based on the MODS metadata of the GovInfo Congressional Bills collection. Files of the records may be downloaded free of charge from the Bills and Resolutions collection of the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications Maintenance Files repository. The records may be retrieved in the CGP by the expert mode search: WLTS=BILLSRESOLUTIONS. For more information about the records, please see the October 25, 2023 news alert. We compiled preliminary data about the entire set of 4,746 records (August 2023 to March 2024), which is available in the collection description.
Please note: We need to add a small group of records for measures introduced during this period to the collection. Also, we cataloged eight records for measures introduced in January-March 2023 to test the process, which are not included in the collection.
Federal agencies must now submit congressionally mandated reports to GPO in compliance with the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act, after first submitting to Congress or any required committee or subcommittee of Congress. Submitted reports are published and made available to the public on GPO's online system of access, GovInfo, in the Congressionally Mandated Reports collection.
We started to make the CGP records for Congressionally Mandated Reports available for downloading in a new GitHub collection of the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) Records Maintenance Files repository. The collection contains the 201 bibliographic records added to the CGP in June and July 2024. The records are also available in OCLC.
The records are based on the MODS metadata of the GovInfo Congressionally Mandated Reports collection. MCS staff members complete and authenticate the records for the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC). All Congressionally Mandated Reports records may be retrieved in the CGP by the expert mode search: WLTS=CMR. Preliminary data about the records is available in the collection description on GitHub.
We are very interested in hearing from you about your experience using this new set of records and others in our GitHub collection. Please contact us via askGPO. When submitting an inquiry/feedback, please use the Cataloging/Metadata (Policy and Records) category.
We launched a new GitHub repository, Catalog of U.S. Government Publications Geographic-Based Record Sets. The repository contains sets of Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) bibliographic records based on geographic coverage and governmental jurisdictions. Our intention is to provide a new product to assist Federal depository libraries with the development and management of their collections and the GPO records in their catalogs and systems.
Multiple MARC fields are used to identify records that are related to a particular state or entity. The reports are in the form of tab-separated values spreadsheets. They include several different types of metadata, such as the match points, titles, SuDoc numbers, agency name, and OCLC numbers, and collection development and management information (shipping list numbers, agency classes, and the OCLC numbers of the CGP online version records of tangible publications). More information is available in the repository description
We are testing this process with one state in each National Collection Service Area (NCSA):
Our plan is to create record sets for all states and entities and to combine the files for the states and entities in each NCSA into individual collections.
Effective today, Thursday, August 1, 2024, the business unit in GPO’s Library Services & Content Management, formerly known as Library Technical Services, will now be named Metadata and Collection Services (MCS).
This name change was put into place to better reflect the unit’s business operations, which focus on providing metadata analysis and creating metadata for Federal Government information so that the Federal depository library community and the American public can easily identify and find Government information. Oversight of the By-Law and International Exchange Service (IES) Programs remains unchanged. The unit will continue to be responsible for the development of the National Collection of U.S. Government Public Information, supporting the distribution of Print Distribution Titles (PDT) and titles from Special Selection Offers.
A new webcast, "LSCM GitHub Repositories Webcast Series – Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Subject-Based Resources," is now available for viewing.
Visit FDLP Academy for access to FDLP educational and training resources. All are encouraged to share and re-post information about these free training opportunities.
The first webcast (Overview) of the LSCM GitHub repositories webcast series is now available in the FDLP Academy.
Visit FDLP Academy for access to FDLP educational and training resources. All are encouraged to share and re-post information about these free training opportunities.
Learn more about the
Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP)
For questions or comments, contact the FDLP Resource Guides Team at @askGPO