¾«¶«´«Ã½

¾«¶«´«Ã½Midwinter Meeting


Saturday, January 25, 2003 2 :00 -5:30 p.m.


Philadelphia , Sheraton Society Hill, Ballroom E

Welcome and Introductions

Coordinator Chuck Eckman called the meeting to order at 2:00 pm. Present:& Jim Church (Secretary), Susan Pinckard, Barb Mann, Sandy Peterson (Coordinator-elect), Margaret Renton, Polly Bosch, Matt Brosius, Jackie Druery, David Griffiths, Erminio D’Onofrio, Julia Wallace, Daisy Dominguez, Don Hagen, Libby Bauer, Patricia Finney, Marian Shaaban,& Christof Galli, Robert Rohrbacher, Helen Sheehy, Susan White, Jennifer Abrahmson, Tim Klassen, Anna Vorhonen, Lorraine Pellicamo Waitman, Jean-Philippe Decraene, James R. Jacobs, Lynn Stuart, Norman Ross and Barbie Selby.

Approval of Agenda

Chuck Eckman asked for a motion to approve the agenda The motion was made, seconded & adopted.

Approval of 2002 Annual Conference Minutes

Chuck Eckman then asked for a motion to approve the IDTF ¾«¶«´«Ã½2002 Annual Conference Minutes The motion was made, seconded and adopted.

Reports from Committee Liaisons

Chuck Eckman asked for reports from the following IDTF committee liaisons.

• Cataloging Committee, Barbie Selby
  
  
  
  

Cataloging Committee will meet tomorrow, and at this time there is nothing to report.

• Education Committee, Barb Mann
  
  
  
  

The education committee is working 9/11 information kits for documents librarians, information literacy projects in education, and the GODORT Clearinghouse exchange.

• Government Information Technology Committee
  
  
  
  

GITCO will meet tomorrow, and at this time there is nothing to report.

• Legislation Committee, Susan Pinckard
  
  
  
  

The Legislation Committee is concerned about two recent and familiar acts of legislation: the USA Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act. The committee is particularly concerned about FBI surveillance authority under the Patriot Act, and the post of “privacy officer” to be appointed by Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge Legislation will be working on these issues and drafting resolutions to articulate GODORT’s position on them.

• Program Committee, Margaret Renton
  
  
  
  

Program met for the first time on Friday. There was discussion of the 2003 ¾«¶«´«Ã½Annual GODORT pre-conference on the digitization of government information The pre-conference will last one and a half days, and will be hosted by Cathy Hartman. They are expecting a huge turnout, so pre-registration has been set for February 22
^nd They have already booked a room that will hold from 300 to 500 people. Most speakers have been assigned, and the event will probably be video recorded and sold Program is working on publicizing the conference.

• Rare & Endangered Documents, Jackie Druery
  
  
  
  

The committee has not yet met. Two agenda items of note will be August Imholz of Readex/Newsbank, who will come to discuss Readex’s plans to digitize the Congressional Serial Set, and Donna Koepp, who will report on the Serial Set inventory.

• IFLA. Helen Sheehy reported for Debbi Schaubman, who was absent
  
  
  
  

There will be a call soon for papers at the upcoming Berlin conference, which will be announced on GOVDOC-L. The following year at the Crimea conference there is the possibility of a two-day seminar, following up on the Moscow IFLA program on government information.

• ¾«¶«´«Ã½IRRT/International Relations Committee, David Griffiths.
  
  
  
  

The International Relations Roundtable sub-committees met this morning The executive committee will meet tomorrow.

• Agency Liaison Program, Marian Shabaan
  
  
  
  

Marian Shaaban distributed the report “IDTF Agency Liaison Reports: IDTF Midwinter Meeting January 25, 2003.” The report included updates on the Council of Europe (Marian Shaaban) International Labour Organization (Susan White), International Monetary Fund (Vida Margaitis), OECD (Lynne Stuart), Readex (Barb Mann), and the United Nations (David Griffiths). Highlights include the debut of International Financial Statistics (IFS) online, the start of a subscription based blanket order for ILO monographs, and the addition of retrospective United Nations Masthead documents to the ODS database. Marian urged all the liaisons to submit reports: they are posted on the IDTF website and distributed at each conference. She also noted two new additions to the liaison list:& James Jacobs (UCSD) for WIPO and ITU, and Susan White (Princeton University) for the ILO.

Reports from the Field

• United Nations
  
  
  
  

The United Nations is launching a new version of UNBISNet. The Beta version will debut in early February A re-direct will be put up at the old website The site will include a new platform for voting records which will allow user-defined retrieval of voting data. They are also launching a new version of the UNBIS Thesaurus in six languages The UN welcomes feedback about these new products: please contact the Dag Hammarskjold Library with suggestions.




ODS is still not free, although they are considering this. Many links for full-text documents available through UNBISNet or elsewhere on the UN web pages now link directly to ODS, even though this remains a fee based service otherwise. The UN has recently launched a new CD ROM of the complete run of United Nations yearbooks, from 1948-1999. The 2000 update will be released soon. Other new possibilities include the inclusion of UN Sales publications in the ODS, a new e-commerce site, and an online version of the UN Yearbook.

• OECD
  
  
  
  

Matt Brosius distributed a two page “Report from OECD.” Usage of Source OECD is up. There are more subscribers and more hits on the database. “Any day now” the International Energy Agency will be adding IEA data to the statistics section. IEA data will be included on Source OECD subscribers until June: after that a separate subscription will be required OECD health data will also be available soonunfortunately users will need to download special software onto a local PC to use it. A new statistical compendium will allow users to navigate more easily across the different statistical databases.




In May or June a new SourceOECD platform will roll out. There will be less “clicks” to get to text and data There will also be mirror sites on the U.S. east and west coasts. Data downloads will no longer be limited to 15,000 cells:& the number will increase to 60,000. Full-text searching will be available. URLS will be constant, allowing users to catalog specific items Users will be able to save searches OECD is also working on archiving and preservation of digital data They are experimenting with open archives/open URLs, and are collaborating with the Library of Congress.

• World Bank
  
  
  
  

No World Bank representative could attend. Chuck Eckman reminded the group of the presentation of the new World Bank E-Library given at the FDTF update that morning.

• Norman Ross
  
  
  
  

Norman gave the group a report on his business strategies and years in the business He’s been doing documents filming for 30 years now The big news is he’s been acquired by Proquest, so Norman Ross Publishing (NRP) is no more. With Proquest he continues to work on many of the same projects:& the EU Official Journal, the London Gazette, Council of Europe human rights decisions, the Commonwealth Law Bulletin, and many others He still re-prints back volumes of the U.S. Census on his own in a little company called AMI. As always, he’s eager to hear from us about potential new projects.

• Bernan
  
  
  
  

Don Hagen reported that last year was Bernan’s worst in 15 years, because of problems with their business software. They had virtually no invoicing of distribution for three months The good news is Bernan now claims to have achieved “title comprehensiveness” for IGO publications. They have two new products worthy of note: Basic Instruments and Selected Documents of the World Trade Organization, a continuation of the GATT BISD, and a new WTO Analytical Index, also similar to it’s GATT predecessor.

• Center for Research Libraries
  
  
  
  

Pat Finney reported that the CRL European and Latin American Documents collections have been assessed by David Block (Cornell University) and Mary Gay Anderson (University of Florida). Patricia Finney distributed a summary of the report. The collections are comprised of incomplete holdings of varying spans, usually in short runs. The Latin American collection was characterized as “relatively modest,” the Western European collection as having “few agencies represented in any depth.” The collection needs to be more visible with title and holdings level access. Suggestions for visibility include full cataloging at CRL, a distributed program of cataloging among CRL members, or physical distribution if the collection within the CRL membership. The CRL Collections and Services Advisory panel has reviewed the reports and will make recommendations. Meanwhile, Pat is developing a list of gaps within the Official Gazettes collection, and is up to the P’s in that project.

Old Business

• IFLA Appointment, David Griffiths
  
  
  
  

David Griffiths has put together a draft procedure for selecting a GODORT nominee to IFLA’s Standing Committee of the Government Information and Official Publications section (GIOPS) He distributed the draft to the IDTF membership. The rationale for doing this is that there have been ambiguities in this process in the recent past. These procedures are to be inserted in the GODORT Policies and Procedures Manual.

• Survey of IGO Preservation Practices, Jim Church
  
  
  
  

Jim Church distributed the article “Archiving International Government Information on the Internet: Report from a Survey by the GODORT International Documents Task Force.” The survey was commissioned in January 2001; the article will be published in the Winter 2002 issue of
DttP. The article reports on the plans and policies of IGOs to archive digital documents and publications on websites. Notable findings of the survey include that over 40% of IGOs have not yet formulated plans to archive Internet documents, and that nearly 60% are open to the possibility of collaborating with libraries to accomplish this.




Julia Wallace suggested that a thank you letter be sent to all IGOs who responded to the survey, along with a complimentary copy of the
DttP issue. It was agreed that Jim Church would write the letter and have it signed by the GODORT chair, and that Jim would work with the
DttP editor to supply copies of the magazine to survey respondents.




Susan White and Barb Mann volunteered to work with Jim to review the individual survey responses and develop a set of recommendations for IDTF at its next meeting in Toronto. The group will consider whether the survey should be sent to IGOs on a regular basis in order to monitor developments in the archiving arena for task force purposes.

• Working Group on IGO/NGO Database project, Angel Batiste, Cristof Galli, David Griffiths
  
  
  
  

This project looks like it will not be able to continue for now The original concept was to design a database of IGO/NGO documents dealing with Sub-Saharan Africa. None of the volunteers were able to get enough time and money from their institutions to work on this. It was agreed that the project will be removed from the IDTF agenda, although members of the group may pursue this on their own if they wish.

• Cataloging Toolkit Integration, Barbie Selby
  
  
  
  

IDTF is looking for a volunteer/webmaster to oversee and update the IDTF section of the GODORT cataloging toolbox. Barbie will gladly welcome any nominations. In the meantime, task force members are asked to review the international documents cataloging toolkit and to send suggestions for changes or additions to Barbie directly. It still needs to be determined whether cataloging committee or IDTF will oversee this portion of the toolbox. Barbie will ask when she meets with the cataloging committee.

• IDTF Website, David Griffiths
  
  
  
  

David noted that some members think the IDTF website needs to be revised from ground up He will welcome suggestions.

New Business

• Digital Archiving of IGO Content: Issues for Libraries, Jim Church
  
  
  
  

Jim Church believes that two important and emerging trends in documents librarianship are the cataloging and archiving of digital documents. The Library of Congress has worked with the Internet Archive to preserve US Congressional Senate and House member websites
. The University of California has recently embarked on two projects addressing these issues: a shared cataloging project which uses to PURL server to apply Persistent Identifiers (PIDS) to digital cataloging records, including government publications, and a California Digital Library feasibility study to explore technologies for acquiring and preserving digital documents
Jim wonders whether other institutions are exploring similar technologies, and whether a future GODORT program or pre-conference on this topic would be a good idea. It was agreed that the task force would consider exploring this option for 2005 ¾«¶«´«Ã½annual.

• 2003 Annual Conference Issues (panel, guests, etc), Chuck Eckman
  
  
  
  

Chuck proposed a panel with speakers invited to discuss their approaches to incorporating international documents in to library instruction programs and continuing education for librarians. The panel would take place at the beginning of the IDTF meeting in Toronto. Peter Hajnal would be invited to introduce the topic and to moderate. Additional speakers might include Mike McCaffrey-Noviss (University of Toronto library school, library school course on international documents), Helen Sheehy (Penn State University, course on international relations sources), and Susan White (Princeton University, international documents seminar) Speakers would make brief ten-minute oral presentations, and a discussion and QA session would follow. IDTF approved this proposal and Chuck will proceed with planning.

• IDTF Liaison to ACRL, Women's Studies Section
  
  
  
  

The task force believes that the literature of IGO’s concerned with women’s issues are critical sources of information and often difficult to identify and acquire The task force agreed to a proposal to establish a liaison relationship with the ACRL Women’s Studies Section in order to better inform IDTF discussions in this area. Susan White agreed to serve in this new liaison role.