Government Information Quarterly
Volume 2, Number 2, 1985
CONTENTS
Discussion Forum: Copyright Camouflage--Its Role
in Governmental Manipulation of Public Opinion
M. B. Schnapper ....................................................... 127
Perceptions of the Freedom of Information Act (F.O.I.A.)
and Proposed Amendments by the F.O.I.A. Administrators
J. Norman Baldwin and Dan Siminoski ............................. 131
Resource Allocation to Government Documents Departments
in Academic Libraries
Kevin L. Cook .................................................. 143
"State Plans": Their Development and Potential for Regional
Depository Libraries Participating in the GPO Depository Program
Sandra K. Faull ................................................. 157
A Comparison of Manual and Online Searching
of Government Document Indexes
Cynthia E. Murphy .............................................. 169
Electronic Filing of Documents with the Government:
New Technology Presents New Problems
Glenn English ................................................... 183
Documents Librarianship: I
Federal Documents in the Online Catalog:
Problems, Options, and the Future
Jan Swanbeck .................................................. 187
Documents Librarianship: II
MEDOC: An index for the Health Sciences
Wayne J. Peay, Valerie Florance, W. Clay Epstein,
and A. Michael Thelin ........................................... 193
Contributors ........................................................ 207
Communications .................................................... 209
Forthcoming ........................................................ 211
Reviews
David C. Heisser, Editor
Bureau of the Census Catalog 1984
'
Reviewed by Patrick J. Wilkinson ................................. 213
Congressional Television: A Legislative History
By Ronald Garay
Reviewed by Joe Morehead ....................................... 215
A Directory of Computerized Data Files, 1984
Reviewed by James R. Veatch, Jr . ................................. 216
Documenting America: Assessing the Condition
of Historical Records in the States
Edited by Lisa B. Weber
Reviewed by H. G. Jones ......................................... 217
Future War: Armed Conflict in the Next Decade
Edited by Frank Bamaby
Reviewed by Susan E. Parker ..................................... 218
Investigation of Alleged Improper Alterations of House Documents:
Report of the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct,
House of Representatives, Pursuant to House Resolution 254,
98th Congress, Ist Session
Reviewed by LeRoy C. Schwarzkopf ............................... 219
The Legislative Veto: Congressional Control of Regulation
By Barbara Hinkson Craig
Reviewed by Thelme Freides ...................................... 221
1980 U.S. Census Population and Housing Characteristics
Reviewed by Michael Vocino ...................................... 222
Numeric Databases
Edited by Ching-chih Chen and Peter Hernon
Reviewed by Richard Leacy ....................................... 223
State Plans for Federal Depository Documents
Reviewed by Peter Hernon............................................226
Topographic Mapping of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand
By Mary Lynette Laarsgaard
Reviewed by Morris M. Thompson ................................. 227
Using the Access to Information Act:
How to Cut through Government Red Tape
By Heather Mitchell and Murray Rankin
Reviewed by Thomas B. Riley ..................................... 228
Perceptions of the Freedom of Information Act
(F.O.I.A.) and Proposed Amendments by the
F.O.I.A. Administrators
J. NORMAN BALDWIN and DAN SIMINOSKI
Recent efforts to amend the Freedom of Information Act (F.O.I.A.) suggest that the Act has caused widespread problems felt by its administrators. In order to test the validity of this suggestion, the authors surveyed F.O.I.A. administrators throughout the Federal government and report the findings from this survey here. These findings indicate that the administrators generally have positive perceptions of the Act, yet generally support specific proposed amendments to it.
Resource allocation to documents departments in academic libraries is not a purely rational process. This lack of rationality leads to wide variation in the local levels of support upon which the GPO depository system depends. This article demonstrates these variations and suggests how documents librarians may change the levels of support their departments receive from sources within and beyond their libraries.
Many librarians affiliated with regional depositories are concerned about the ability of their libraries to receive, process, store, and service all the titles and series available on deposit from the Government Printing Office. Some of them have even questioned whether their library can maintain regional status and fulfill all the service elements specified in the Guidelines for the Depository Library System (1977). As this article demonstrates, regional librarians supported the concept of state plans because they believed that this process offered an excellent means to address their concerns. However, in only a few instances have the plans fulfilled the purpose which regional staff envisioned. Nonetheless, the foundation which they laid, if pursued and if the basic documentation underlying the depository program are rewritten, could lead to the type of changes sought by regional libraries.
The online and printed equivalents of the GPO's Monthly Catalog, the National Technical Information Service's Government Reports Announcements & Index, and Congressional Information Service's CIS Index have been examined to compare the recall, precision, overlap, and cost-effectiveness of online and manual searching. The online searches were less labor intensive and retrieved more relevant citations than the manual searches. However, a large number of citations retrieved were not duplicated in equivalent printed and online indexes.
The following statement is reprinted from the Congressional Record (March 14, 1984, pp. H1614-H1615). Given the importance of the topic to the development of Federal information policies, the editor believes that the 31 questions which Representative English raises merit wide attention and discussion.
The Government Printing Office Cataloging Tapes appear at first glance to be a cost-effective and efficient method for adding bibliographic records for U.S. doc- uments to an online catalog. However, errors and inconsistencies in these tapes compounded by the lack of documentation make it virtually impossible to load them directly into an online catalog. Currently the only options available for libraries wishing to make use of these tapes are: to purchase them from a com- mercial cataloging service, to catalog documents one at a time using a bibli- ographic utility, or to contract with a commercial data base vendor which offers access to the GPO Cataloging Tapes.
MEDOC is an index to U.S. government documents in the health sciences which has been produced at the Eccles Health Sciences Library for over a decade. The necessity for such an index and its development from an in-house catalog into a self-supporting subscription service is discussed. The application of computer technology in the production of the index is described. A detailed description of the factors which influenced the design of the current version of MEDOC is presented. The article concludes with a description of management concerns, including the development of a system for maintaining subscriber records.