GPO Releases the First Group of United States Congressional Serial Set MARC Records

As part of GPO’s partnership with the Law Library of Congress to digitize the United States Congressional Serial Set and make the volumes available in GovInfo, GPO has released the first group of MARC records in the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) and posted files of the records on GitHub. With each release of publications in govinfo, GPO will add the MARC records to the CGP and post the files on GitHub.

This record set includes 9,443 monographs and 49 serials in various Congressional publication series, including House and Senate documents and reports. LSCM staff members analyzed and reviewed the records and batch processed global updates and enhancements. The publications range in date from approximately 1818 to 1927. All records have Superintendent of Documents classification numbers for the Congressional publication series and the Serial Set volumes. Most records have OCLC numbers. The records do not contain FDLP item numbers.

On GitHub, the records are available for downloading in MARC UTF-8 in the cataloging-records-serial-set-utf8 repository and in MARCXML UTF-8 in the cataloging-records-serial-set-marcxml repository. The total size of the file is 19 MB (19,000,000 bytes). A .csv file lists the Serial Set volume numbers represented in the records. For more information about downloading records from GitHub, please visit the Sources of GPO Cataloging Records page on FDLP.gov.

The records are discoverable in the CGP via the Congressional Serial Set Catalog and the standard search modes. In the expert search mode, you can use a local field search to retrieve all of the Serial Set records and combine that search with other elements: wlts=SERIALSET?

For feedback and questions about the records, please contact us via askGPO, and use the Cataloging/Metadata (Policy and Records) category.