FDLP Basic Collection (2001 revised list)

The Basic Collection lists "vital sources of information that support the public's right to know about the workings and essential activities of  their Federal Government."  Libraries in the Federal Depository Library Program are expected to make these documents available to the public.  (Administrative Notes, July 15, 2001; full text below.)   This revised list updates the list first selected in 1977.
Basic Collection titles at the Mary H. Weir Public Library

    Some Basic Collection items are now available only online, via the Internet. Others are available in "tangible format" (paper, microfiche or CD-ROM) only, or in both tangible format and online. We do not receive all of these titles in all formats.  For space reasons, we no longer receive a few of them in any tangible format at all.  If you need something we don't have, and the online substitutes listed below do not suffice, we will Interlibrary Loan it for you!
    This table will help you find current issues and recent back issues of these materials, either in the Mary H. Weir Public Library's collection or on the Internet, and point you to related or alternate sources that may also help you.

Return to top of table.

Explanations of some terms used in this table:
    SuDoc numbers, (short for Superintendent of Documents Classification numbers) are the classification system used by many Depository libraries to organize their government documents collection, or parts of them. This system allows documents to be arranged according to the agency that publishes them.  In the SuDoc Classification scheme, the letter (or letters) and first few numbers at the beginning of each SuDoc number stand for a particular Cabinet-level department or other agency.  For example, A represents the Agriculture Department, PREX stands for the Executive Office of the President (which includes agencies such as the Office of Management and Budget and the CIA), and X is for Congress. Our microfiche drawers of Depository materials and part of our storage area are arranged by SuDoc numbers.
    The SuDoc classification is not the same as the Library of Congress Classification used by many college and some large public libraries, although they produce call numbers that look similar. The LC classification arranges materials by subject, much like the Dewey Decimal Classification, which we use for most of our collection, does. Many items in our collection have both a SuDoc number and a Dewey number, and when they do they are shelved in the main collection by Dewey number. The Location column in the above table will tell you the Dewey number for the Basic Collection items in our collection.
    At other Depository libraries, government documents may be shelved by SuDoc, or by LC number, or by another system; ask the librarians there for help.
    Item numbers are used by the Federal Depository Library Program to manage Depository libraries' selections of documents. Selective depositories such as the Mary H. Weir Public Library choose which documents we wish to receive by adding or dropping item numbers, with some exceptions (a mininum percentage is required, and three items, 0154-B, 0556-C, and 1004-E, are required of all Depository libraries). Currently, the Mary H. Weir Public Library selects 7.3% of all items available. Regional depository libraries -- there is one for each state -- receive all the items available.  West Virginia University is the regional depository for West Virginia.

FDLP Basic Collection Revised
from Administrative Notes 7/15/2001

            The list of titles constituting the Basic Collection was developed in 1977 to identify the most basic Federal documents for inclusion in depository collections. These documents are vital sources of  information that support the public's right to know about the workings and essential activities of their Federal Government. Good collection development and maintenance practices dictate that the list of titles must be kept current. Changes in the publications, including format, must be recognized, and new titles should be added as the user community and agency publication practices change.

            Library Programs Service (LPS) presented a proposed revision of the Basic Collection to the Depository Library Council for its consideration at its spring 2001 meeting. Following Council action, the Collection was revised, and replaces the Basic Collection found in the Federal Depository Library Manual, Appendix C, pp. 173-174 (1993). The revised list of titles in the Collection shown below is also available via the FDLP Desktop at <www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fdlp/coll-dev/basic-01.html>.

            All depositories are expected to have the titles in the Basic Collection accessible to their patrons (see Instructions to Depository Libraries, page 5, and the Guidelines for the Federal Depository Library Program, 3-1). How this is accomplished is a local decision; however, merely linking to GPO Access or the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) does not provide sufficient access to all of these titles. While access is best accomplished by cataloging the titles and including active hyperlinks in the bibliographic record, other alternatives are available to depositories:

[Inserted into this list are explanations of how the Mary H. Weir Public Library is addressing these alternatives.]

• Link to all the titles in the Basic Collection from the library's Web site (The table on this page does that, and other pages on our site already have links to many of these titles.)
• Catalog the Basic Collection using a collection level record and including a hyperlink (Most of these items being in our collection in tangible format of one sort or another, we hope to add URLs to the catalog entries for these items, but hyperlinks are not yet supported by our cataloging software. We also have some "dummies" on our shelves to point patrons to materials online or in other parts of the collection.)
• Link to the revised Basic Collection Web page from the library's Web site (Again, this page does that.)
• Purchase and make available commercial equivalents (tangible or electronic) of the Basic Collection titles  (Such commercial equivalents as we have, and other alternative sources, are noted in the Location column of the above table.)
• Incorporate Basic Collection titles into topical bibliographies or guides (We have done that in the past and may in the future. As mentioned above, we already have links to some of these documents from our web pages. Our practice of including Subject Bibliographies in the Vertical File is intended to serve a similar purpose: "If you're interested in this topic, you might want to look at these.")
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Return to the table of Basic Collection documents.
Return to the library's Government Documents main page.
Go to the page for the Executive Branch (President and Cabinet), for the Legislative Branch (Congress), or for the Judicial Branch (Supreme Court).
Return to the main page for the Mary H. Weir Public Library.
Return to the Northern Panhandle Information Resources page.
 

This page was last updated July 31, 2001.