| Articles | Books & more | Help | Library Information |
Purpose
There are approximately
1,300 federal depository
libraries in the United States. They receive federal publications
for free, in return for making them available to the public. This
study attempts to determine whether the material sent to depositories is
also available to the public, for free, over the World Wide Web.
From each of the selected shipping lists
we then randomly selected a document. (A random number generator
was used in both cases.) On June 13-14, 2000 we searched for the
documents on the World Wide Web using:
*
Catalog
of U.S. Government Publications
*
Govbot
* The home page
of the authoring agency
| 1. Available on the WWW | 25 | 39% (all percentages are rounded) |
| 2. Available in different format * | 6 | 9% |
| TOTAL | 31 | 48% |
| 3. Partially Available @ | 3 | 5% |
| 4. Newer issues only available # | 2 | 3% |
| 5. Older issues only available + | 1 | 2% |
| 6. By paid subscription only | 1 | 2% |
| 7. Abstract only available | 2 | 3% |
| 8. Not available | 24 | 37% |
| TOTAL | 33 | 52% |
* 2. Available in different format:
The
content of the publication is available on the website, but the publication
itself is not.
@ 3. Partially available: In the
case of some congressional hearings the written statements of witnesses
are available on the Web, but the hearing transcripts, with the interaction
between congresspersons and witnesses (actual questions and answers), are
not.
# 4. Newer issues only available: Issues
being sent to depositories (including a January 2000 issue) of some
periodicals have already been removed from the Web.
+ 5. Older issues only available: The
1998 version of a volume of the Code of Federal Regulations was on
the Web, but not the 1999
version which was being sent to depository libraries.
| AUTHORING AGENCY | 1. | 2. | 3. | 4. | 5. | 6. | 7. | 8. | ||
| Agriculture Department | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Commerce Department | 4 | |||||||||
| Congress | 8 | 3 | 5 | |||||||
| Defense Department | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||
| Education Department | 2 | |||||||||
| Energy Department | 1 | |||||||||
| Environmental Protection Agency | 2 | 2 | ||||||||
| Federal Emergency Management Agency | 1 | |||||||||
| General Accounting Agency | 1 | |||||||||
| Government Printing Office | 1 | |||||||||
| Health and Human Services Department | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Interior Department | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Justice Department | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Judiciary | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| NASA | 1 | |||||||||
| National Archives | 5 | 1 | ||||||||
| Nuclear Regulatory Commission | 2 | 1 | ||||||||
| Occupational Safety & Health Review Comm. | 1 | |||||||||
| Personnel Management Office | 1 | |||||||||
| Securities and Exchange Commission | 1 | |||||||||
| Smithsonian Institution | 1 | |||||||||
| Social Security Administration | 1 | |||||||||
| State Department | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Transportation Department | 1 | |||||||||
| Treasury Department | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| TOTAL | 25 | 6 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 24 | ||
For more information about this study, contact Rob Lopresti.
Back to Robert Lopresti's homepage