Mission:

Through coordinated and collective action, expand and enhance digital access to U.S. federal publications including those issued by GPO and other federal agencies.

Goals:

• Comprehensive digital collection: Build a comprehensive HathiTrust digital collection of federal documents distributed in print format by the Government Publishing Office as part of the Federal Depository Library Program.
• Enduring access: Ensure that the benefits of HathiTrust work in areas such as improved quality, shared print collection management, collection development, enhanced resource discovery, and broader access to scholarly materials are realized in the HathiTrust federal documents collection and services.
• Community: In collaboration with stakeholders within HathiTrust and in the greater community, solve shared problems related to identifying, cataloging, digitizing, organizing, preserving, hosting, and providing access to U.S. federal documents.

Advisory:

HathiTrust Federal Documents Advisory Committee [1]

Staff and Contributors:

• Heather Christenson, Program Officer for Federal Documents and Collections
• Valerie Glenn, Project Lead, U.S. Federal Documents Registry
• Josh Steverman, Applications Developer

Program Updates:

• July 2017 [2]
• March 2017 [3]

Program activities:

• The HathiTrust Federal Documents Collection Framework [4] outlines an initial set of federal documents collection development priorities.
• The HathiTrust U.S. Government Documents Registry [5] is intended to include metadata for the comprehensive corpus of U.S. federal documents.

Presentations and Resources:

• U.S. Federal Documents in HathiTrust: A Collection Profile [6], Valerie Glenn
• Building a U.S. Federal Government Documents Collection in HathiTrust [7], Heather Christenson
• Detecting U.S. Federal Documents to Expand Access [8]. Mike Furlough, Valerie Glenn
• Creating a Registry of US Federal Government Documents [9], Valerie Glenn

History:

• In 2011, HathiTrust members at the Constitutional Convention approved a ballot initiative to provide “Expanded coverage & enhanced access to U.S. Government Documents [10].”
• In 2014, the HathiTrust Government Documents Planning and Advisory Group [11], issued a Report and Recommendations that form the basis for the Program.
• In 2015, the HathiTrust U.S. Government Documents Registry [5] was released in alpha. The ultimate goal of the Registry database is to contain metadata for the comprehensive corpus of U.S. federal documents, including an indication of whether those documents have been digitized.
• In 2016, a Program Officer for Federal Documents and Collections was hired [12] to oversee implementation of the broader Program.
• In 2016, the HathiTrust U.S. Government Documents Registry [5] progressed to beta [13] stage.

Contact: Heather Christenson [14]