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Syracuse University Libraries will become the first federal depository library system to preserve government documents as they are published under a newly expanded agreement with the United States Government Publishing Organization.

Under the expanded agreement, signed in June, SU will now preserve new titles and volumes in the U.S. Statutes at Large, or all laws enacted in a congressional session, and the U.S. Code, a consolidation of the United States’ general and permanent laws. Previously, SU only preserved historic volumes of these documents.

“We are proud that SU Libraries are open to the public and are able to provide federal government materials to the American people, which is the point of the GPO program,” said David Seaman, SU’s dean of libraries as well as the interim dean of the School of Information Studies, in an email to The Daily Orange.

SU Libraries has been a federal depository in partnership with the GPO’s Federal Depository Library Program since 1878. About four years ago, SU became a “Preservation Steward,” pledging to preserve government documents in their collections, said John Olson, a government and geo-information librarian at SU.

The GPO currently produces between 10,000 and 11,000 different publications that the university can choose from to preserve. The university chooses from new volumes four to five times a year, and typically preserves about 64% of the materials it receives, according to Olson.

The depository collection is accessible for SU students and staff or residents of some of the surrounding area and is mainly used as primary source research material, Olson said. Although most of the recently preserved documents are now available digitally, the libraries still preserve print publications.

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“The commitment to the preservation of original documents is the hallmark of a university committed to research excellence,” said Robert Weiner, the law library’s electronic services librarian.

There are currently over 1,100 federal depository libraries, including 64 Preservation Stewards.

The SU law library is also a congressionally designated depository for federal documents. The law library collection is smaller than the one in Bird since the focuses of the documents are legal and congressional, he said

“Federal documents represent United States history and it’s important that these records are preserved,” Weiner said. “It takes multiple entities to commit to preservation to ensure that some catastrophic event does not wipe out what might be only one or two last surviving copies.”

Published on August 29, 2022 at 10:33 pm

Contact Stephanie: spwright@syr.edu