Professional Development

The morning began with remarks by the new Public Printer, Robert C. Tapella. In fact, Mr. Tapella is so new to his position, that this was his first public appearance since being confirmed. Mr. Tapella said that his vision as Public Printer is to keep the best aspects of the FDLP in place, while adding new features and improving service. Ric Davis, Director, Library Services & Content Management, Acting Superintendent of Documents, GPO, then gave the traditional GPO update. Some key points from Ric’s update include the fact that a working group has been established to deal with the distribution backlog; several GPO/library partnerships have been renewed, or are in the process of being renewed; and the establishment of shared regionals is moving forward. Some other announcements: the Biennial Survey is online (due Oct. 31); the “Final Draft” of the FDLP Guidelines has been posted; several enhancements have been or are being made to the ILS.

I had a nice lunch with Marion Parker from PCL and Beth Rowe from UNC-CH. Marion is currently a member of the DLC, so it is fun to hear about some of the inner workings of the conference.

After lunch, James Mauldin from GPO gave an update on GPO’s transition from PURLs (persistent URLs) to Handles. I’m sure a member of the Tech Team could give a much better explanation of what a handle is than I can. GPO has performed a small beta test of converting PURLs to Handles. Mr. Mauldin assured the audience that the problems that currently exist with the PURLs will be resolved before they are converted to Handles. Also, the conversion should be seemless to the end user; we shouldn’t have to modify any of the 856 fields in our cataloging records because the PURLs that currently reside there will point to a proxy server that will resolve the links.

Mr. Tapella then announced the Depository Library of the Year: the St. Charles City-County Library. Check out one of their excellent services: UncleSam for Kids.

The last session of the day was devoted to a discussion of the necessity for updating the Guidelines for the Federal Depository Library Program, since there is a newly revised Handbook.