Professional Development

Most of the sessions I attended today dealt with depository administration, not a topic to appeal to a broad audience, so I will try to hit some of the highlights.

I attended a session entitled “Offering Services: 24/7,” which turned out to have a different focus that I supposed from the title. Following a recommendation from the Spring Depository Library Council, GPO staff have been working on developing a registry of government information librarians who have special areas of expertise and who are willing to be avaible to assist in research. The session mainly focused on a discussion of whether this registry would be available only to other librarians, or would be open to the public.

The next session was on the redesign of the FDLP desktop. GPO is working toward a more web 2.0 approach, with more interoperatibility, rss feeds, etc. We were given a good overview of the new pages and it looks like a much more useable site. At the moment site access is limited to depository coordinators; however, after the Biennial Survey is completed the site will be open for others to register. Many of the news and other information features are accessible without registration, so you may take a look if you are interested.

After lunch I attended a session on the new Public Access Assessment program being developed by GPO. GPO is legally required to review depository library services to make sure each depository is meeting its requirements to provide free public access to materials it receives through the FDLP. Some of you might remember a time when we actually had inspectors come to our depository libraries and check out our collections, cataloging, signage, use-policies, librarian’s reference knowledge, etc. As staffing shortages limited the GPO’s inspector program, libraries were then required to complete self-studies, covering many of the same service components. Now, GPO will use a library’s responses to the Biennial Survey and an overview of the Library’s webpages to determine if any follow-up is necessary for questionable or unclear policies. Following a brief description of the new program, Council and the audience discussed several scenarios that might cause barriers to access and what steps might be taken to overcome those barriers. As has always been the case, we were reminded that GPO likes to see comparable and accommodating policies and services applied to the documents collection, not necessarily the exact same policy as is applied to the general collection. In general, ZSR is doing very well in providing open and accommodating access and service for our documents collection; however, this is something that we must keep in mind whenever we review or create policies and procedures that create any limits on access.

My last session of the day was a Q&A session with the Library Services and Content Management (LSCM) staff of GPO. Really technical stuff here, so I’ll spare the non-depository librarian audience. More tomorrow!