Federal Depository Librarians at SRU

Representatives from eight of the ten PASSHE federal depository libraries recently held their annual meeting at Bailey Library. Federal depositories are responsible, according to the Federal Depository Library Program guidelines, for providing access to government information in an impartial environment. Bailey Library has been a depository library since the 1960s and has thousands of print documents in its collection. In the last few years, the federal government has focused on publishing information online and depositories have responded to this shift. At Bailey Library we add records to our online catalog that allow patrons to directly access these virtual documents. This move to "intangible" documents was a major focus of the recent meeting at SRU as we discussed how best to preserve the print materials we currently have and provide easy access to these new, electronic collections.