FDLP Modeling project web site launch
Ross Housewright
Dear colleagues (with apologies for cross-posting),
On behalf of the Government Printing Office, Ithaka S+R is launching a project that will develop sustainable models for the Federal Depository Library Program in the 21st century. The Program plays a critical role in making federal government information available to the American public, preserving it, and providing services to help the public and specialized user communities to make effective use of government information. We’re currently reaching out to the broad community interested in government transparency as well as libraries of all types – public, government, academic, and law libraries, and both participants and non-participants in the Program – to alert you of the launch of this project. We hope that you will engage with us regularly during the project’s six-month duration, to ensure that your experience and perspective is incorporated to the greatest extent possible.
Engaging the community – including non-participating libraries that may rely on depository libraries in providing government information services to their constituents as well as members of the Program – is a priority for this project, as is gathering the perspectives of the broader open government community. We will rely on these inputs in our efforts to model a FDLP that meets the needs of depository libraries as well as of the broader library community and those they serve. Towards this end, we’ve just launched a website – fdlpmodeling.net – to serve as a venue for community engagement, providing updates on the status of the project, offering a variety of mechanisms for community input, and sharing drafts and interim deliverables for comment. We’d encourage you to visit the site, learn about the project, and share your thoughts with us at this early stage. While you’re there, please subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for email updates so you can be alerted of new posts. And of course, please share this information with any colleagues or others who might be interested.
We hope to hear from you over the course of this project, either via fdlpmodeling.net or directly by email. Thank you very much for your interest.
Ross Housewright & Roger Schonfeld, Ithaka S+R
Ross Housewright
Research Analyst
Ithaka S+R
Tel: 212-500-2364
Fax: 212-500-2366
Ithaka S+R (www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r)
is the strategy and research arm of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization
dedicated to helping the academic community use digital technologies to
preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in
sustainable ways. The Ithaka S+R team supports innovation in higher education
by working with initiatives and organizations to develop sustainable business models
and by conducting research and analysis on the impact of digital media on the
academic community as a whole. Insights from these efforts are shared broadly,
with more than a dozen reports freely available online. JSTOR, an accessible
archive of more than 1,000 scholarly journals and other content, and Portico, a
service that preserves scholarly content published in electronic form for
future generations, are also part of ITHAKA.