The title of our program is Bibliographic Control in an Electronic FDLP: Problems, Practices and Policies. I would add "promises" to the title of my portion of this program. I think there is a great deal of promise in what we heard this morning from the GPO staff about the URLs they are adding to records. I also think that the "single record" approach described by Jean Hirons to cataloging Internet materials which are also available in paper is an especially good approach to this material.

What I plan to do in the next 10 to 15 minutes is describe the situation at my library (the University of Virginia (UVA), a regional) in reference to our online catalog and cataloging electronic materials, especially Government materials.

A bit of background on the UVA Library system:

We’re a large research library: our last milestone was our 4 millionth volume. We are also heavily involved in making information available electronically. We have six electronic centers: the Social Sciences Data Center, the Geographic Information Center (both of which are administratively a part of the Government Information Resources Section) the Digital Image Center, the Digital Media and Music Center, the Electronic Text Center, and the Special Collections Digital Center.

Our library is committed to making the electronic information we produce available via our online catalog. In preparing for this talk I read papers which have been presented at other conferences by our catalogers, Jackie Shieh and Allison Sleeman, just to give you an idea of how expert our cataloging department is in this area. I don’t make any claims to expertise myself, but I do claim to come from a library that’s cutting (bleeding) edge in its electronic access to information.

Now for a little background on the Government Information Resources Section of the UVA Library and our online cataloging efforts.

We’ve been Marcive customers since 1990 when we brought up our NOTIS online catalog. Because we are a regional we have always subscribed to the entire GPO tape file. When we were a NOTIS library we excluded any records which were corrections to older GPO records. In our NOTIS catalog we did not have the ability to automatically overlay records. Subscribing to all new GPO records has its problems. We still have records in our catalog for materials we never received, but are working to delete the records or acquire the material. But we also received records for serials which GPO cataloged as a part of its CONSER activities (I think) like Foreign Relations of the United States, and the U.S. Government Manual. We simply don’t have the staff to catalog these important titles (and many more) retrospectively, but GPO’s mandate is to do this, which benefits many libraries.

This past summer we switched from NOTIS to SIRSI as our online catalog vendor. With SIRSI we now do have the ability to automatically overlay records. We also have the ability to simply click on a URL in a record and link to the Internet. At the same time we made the online catalog switch we also began receiving the Marcive shipping list records.

Additionally, we asked to receive ALL GPO records, including changes to earlier records. The theory is that the changed GPO records will simply overlay the previous record and be better and more complete. So we made three big changes at one time.

We of course realized that things might not go completely smoothly. They haven’t.

We have had some problems and are still having some problems with getting the overlay process to work properly. However, we feel confident that we will work out those problems fairly soon.

Here’s where I come to the "Promises" section of my talk. I think that, for our library, the overlay capabilities of our SIRSI system and the cataloging practices of GPO together offer an opportunity to provide much better access to Government information in our library. However, I will be the first to say that we are just beginning with this overlay process and are still fine-tuning it. We hope that it will work in the long run, but still have a long way to go before we are sure that it will work.

As I said, we are now receiving all GPO cataloging records, both new records and corrections to previous records for both monographs and serials. These updated or corrected records obviously include the records to which GPO has added URLs. Since GPO is already making great efforts to keep up with new and changing URLs for much Government information, it seemed redundant for us to try to do this too. We would much rather take advantage of all of GPO’s fine work in this area than actually do the work ourselves!

To date GPO has added about 1700 URLs to its records. Our library’s catalog should have almost all of these in our records. Such keyword searches as the following return records for materials which are on the WWW and have clickable links in the cataloging records:

Internet and agriculture

Internet and (government adj manual)

Internet and (elderly or aging)

Problems that we will have to work to overcome include:

A final aspect of our library’s cataloging of Government information on the Internet is our cataloging of the value added information which our electronic centers produce. As I mentioned, both our Social Sciences Data Center (SSDC) and the Geographic Information Center (GIC) are administratively located in the Government Information Resources section of the library. Both of these centers utilize Government produced information and enhance it by making it available via forms on the WWW or by combining it with commercially available software. Our cataloging department has been and will continue to catalog such WWW resources as the Virginia Digital Map Library and the value added version of the Regional Economic Information System. The SSDC and GIC will continue to use Government information as the basis for much of their work on the Web. Our cataloging department will continue to provide access to this value added Government information via VIRGO, our online catalog. It strikes me that this is an example of the Government/depository library partnership which we have heard about.