Interview with Peggy Jarrett at the Gallagher Law Library
The Gallagher Law library is administratively separate from the UW Libraries system. As a requirement of accreditation, law schools must maintain a law library. Predominantly, law libraries within universities are administrated by the law school and separate from the other libraries on campus. In situations where the law library is not administratively separate, the director of the library will generally report to the dean of the law school as well as the dean of the libraries. Gallagher law library has a designation as a selective federal depository library, under the law library program which freed up the official congressional designation for another library in the area to become an FDL. Gallagher selects about 9% of documents distributed through the FDL program. Because the library is located in such close proximity to Suzzallo and the general government documents collection, Gallagher has the opportunity to be discerning in collection development and selection, since so many resources are close at hand to students. Many of the databases accessible in Gallagher are administered by the law library, but they do share some of the cost of Readex U.S. Congressional Serial Set with UW Libraries.
Since I am focused on documents dated pre-1976 I asked about historical sections of the collection. Gallagher is fortunate to have such a large space that they have the ability to keep everything, and they do. The majority of this collection is probably not ‘fugitive’ to the FDLP because they were received from the FDL program or are purchased from commercial vendors (such as annotated sets of the US Code). The commercial products are not produced by government agencies, so they would not be included in the CGP, and the items distributed through the FDL program should be known to GPO. While I do not think I will discover many documents that would be fugitive in the legacy collection, Peggy provided some insight into how born digital items are collected, and the treatment of documents in the Gallagher collection.
The entire collection in Gallagher is open to the public. Anyone with an ID can get a user access code to use the computers or the collection. Everything in the library is classified using LC, except for the microfiche Congressional hearings, which maintain the Y4 SuDoc numbering. The bibliographic records include a note in the metadata marking it as a document from the FDLP or as a government document. If ever requested the librarians can cull a list from their database to show all of the documents in the collection that came from the FDLP.
Peggy also spoke about the handling of born digital documents.She uses online aggregators such as www.bespacific.com to discover resources. If there are items that would be of interest in the collection she sends the document to the UW copy center to have a paper copy created. The bibliographic record will then contain a call number for the print item with a PURL to the online resource. The site bespacific contains a lot of great resources, and Peggy did not know where the site manager gets the information, but it might be worth checking into if the information is of interest to the FDLP and may be contained in many FDLs but not listed in the CGP.
Gallagher law library does not subscribe to MARCIVE because of the cost of subscribing. The library director wants to be discerning about how records are entered into the catalog and prefers to have the technical services librarians on staff manage the record input, but funding is a large part of the decision to not subscribe. Peggy mentioned that without access to that it is hard to know how to check what they receive from outside sources against the distribution from the FDLP without going through the process of remembering to check the CGP.
Since I am focused on documents dated pre-1976 I asked about historical sections of the collection. Gallagher is fortunate to have such a large space that they have the ability to keep everything, and they do. The majority of this collection is probably not ‘fugitive’ to the FDLP because they were received from the FDL program or are purchased from commercial vendors (such as annotated sets of the US Code). The commercial products are not produced by government agencies, so they would not be included in the CGP, and the items distributed through the FDL program should be known to GPO. While I do not think I will discover many documents that would be fugitive in the legacy collection, Peggy provided some insight into how born digital items are collected, and the treatment of documents in the Gallagher collection.
The entire collection in Gallagher is open to the public. Anyone with an ID can get a user access code to use the computers or the collection. Everything in the library is classified using LC, except for the microfiche Congressional hearings, which maintain the Y4 SuDoc numbering. The bibliographic records include a note in the metadata marking it as a document from the FDLP or as a government document. If ever requested the librarians can cull a list from their database to show all of the documents in the collection that came from the FDLP.
Peggy also spoke about the handling of born digital documents.She uses online aggregators such as www.bespacific.com to discover resources. If there are items that would be of interest in the collection she sends the document to the UW copy center to have a paper copy created. The bibliographic record will then contain a call number for the print item with a PURL to the online resource. The site bespacific contains a lot of great resources, and Peggy did not know where the site manager gets the information, but it might be worth checking into if the information is of interest to the FDLP and may be contained in many FDLs but not listed in the CGP.
Gallagher law library does not subscribe to MARCIVE because of the cost of subscribing. The library director wants to be discerning about how records are entered into the catalog and prefers to have the technical services librarians on staff manage the record input, but funding is a large part of the decision to not subscribe. Peggy mentioned that without access to that it is hard to know how to check what they receive from outside sources against the distribution from the FDLP without going through the process of remembering to check the CGP.