Government Document Project

Posted on by Nicholas Ferraz de Oliveira

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library is partnering with the Committee for Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and Google in an effort to digitize a comprehensive collection of U.S. Federal Documents.  Digital facsimiles of successfully scanned Federal Documents will be made publicly accessible through Google Book Search , FDSys , and the Hathi Trust Digital Repository .

The project will digitize many of the government documents which were distributed to CIC libraries through the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) .  Upon completion of that work, the effort will move on to include materials that are unique to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. The process will largely rely upon a sheet-fed scanning process which produces higher resolution images.  All of the volumes digitized in this manner will have a print duplicate within another CIC library.  Items identified as being unique among the CIC libraries will not be digitized through the sheet-fed scanning process.

The CIC-Google Government Document Project’s objective is to digitize a copy of all U.S. Federal documents held by CIC libraries and to develop a collective strategy for the retention and preservation of an adequate number of print copies to satisfy user needs.  According to the CIC, the U.S. Federal Documents collection is where their member libraries believe they can achieve efficiencies by better managing the relationship between digital and print resources, with assurances that an adequate number of print copies are available for future use.

“The University of Minnesota and Pennsylvania State University have already been participating in this project,” said Tom Teper, associate university librarian for collections and assistant dean of libraries.  “And, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Library is proud it was selected as an early contributor soon after the project’s implementation. This is a testament to the University Library’s long-standing commitment to public access to government information and is fully supported by the Illinois State Library , the University Library’s FDLP regional depository.”

All of the remaining CIC libraries will participate in the digitization project in stages.

Additional information about the CIC-Google Government Document Project is located at www.cic.net/home/projects/Library/BookSearch/GovDocs.aspx .

For more information about these digitization efforts at Illinois, please contact Tom Teper at tteper@illinois.edu or 217-244-8755.

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