MetaLib

  • Last Updated: May 05, 2023
  • Published: October 15, 2012

With the increasing amount of information being transitioned online, the U.S. Government Publishing Office's (GPO) MetaLib allows Federal depository libraries to minimize the time spent researching and identifying Federal resources by utilizing the collections that have been assembled by the GPO MetaLib team. Use MetaLib's federated searching to retrieve reports, articles, and citations by simultaneously searching across multiple databases (including reference databases, digital repositories or subject-based Web gateways). This tool, a service of the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP), provides:

  • Simultaneous searching across multiple databases.
  • Search individual databases using the A-Z Resource List.
  • Create your own sets of searchable database collections using the A-Z Resource List.
  • Access and search the "native" interface of these databases from the originating institution/agency.
  • Save configurations and resources to your "E-shelf", a personalized collection manager. The E-shelf is saved based on your browser session and is not permanent.
  • Email and/or save records in various formats (e.g., MARC21, Standard, ProCite) and encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO 8859-1, ASCII).

Resources in MetaLib

GPO started with a seed list of about 30 resources that were pulled from the List of Classes by database designation in 2004. Some of these resources needed to be split out into separate searchable parts, while other were already available from our vendor, Ex Libris, through their Central Knowledge Base (CKB). GPO also reviewed other resources already available via the CKB and chose to add some found there to the initial resource list, since they were free public Federal Government resources and required minimal work to include. GPO has released MetaLib with 53 seed resources from a variety of Federal agencies.

View a complete list of all current resources that can be accessed in MetaLib.

It is GPO’s intention to continue to expand the service with additional resources on an ongoing basis. The pace will depend on discovery, the type of configuration required, and available resources. Resources are added based on GPO staff recommendations and public suggestions, which are reviewed on a regular basis. The decision to implement a suggestion is based upon system capabilities, the type of configuration required, resources necessary to implement, and compliance with GPO Web guidelines.

Linking to MetaLib

URLs in MetaLib are based on Web browser session cookies and are, therefore, not permanent. Persistent URLs (PURL) to core pages have been created for libraries to link to from their Web site or bookmark.