2022 Fall DLC: Unveiling a Hidden Collection: The Allen County Public Library's FDLP Inventory

We will share a presentation about the Allen County Public Library’s historic Federal Government documents inventory. Mainly, we will focus on the library’s current efforts to inventory, weed, and catalog the FDLP collection. We will go over these processes, sharing what works for us in hopes that our workflow might be adapted for use at other institutions. Additionally, we will address the library’s efforts to make these materials available electronically by linking to already-digitized materials and digitizing our own materials that are not currently available online. We hope to make our collection findable and accessible the world over by the end of this years-long project.

Along the way, we will share some of the humorous, outdated, and fascinating items we have come across during the inventory process.

Our ultimate goal is to encourage other depositories to reassess their collections and determine how they might be able to make their materials more accessible and findable. As more libraries become involved in making Government documents discoverable, researchers will gain greater access to our Nation’s most important publications, accounts of historic events, and a trove of historic data.