GPO and NOAA Partner To Increase Permanent Public Access To NOAA Publications

U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Central Library is working to add more than 47,000 unique items published by NOAA authors and grantees to the National Collection of U.S. Government Public Information. GPO shares NOAA’s goal of providing additional avenues to access Government research and making these documents more discoverable to the public. GPO will add the NOAA Institutional Repository (IR) to the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) and create permanent URLs, ensuring documents in NOAA’s IR are available digitally for permanent public access. GPO will work to promote the addition of these documents to more than 1,100 Federal depository libraries nationwide.

“GPO is excited to collaborate with the NOAA Central Library on making these materials easily accessible to the public and supporting NOAA in long-term preservation efforts,” said GPO Director Hugh Nathanial Halpern. “This partnership is a major step forward in cultivating an America Informed.”

Items that will be added to the National Collection and digitally preserved date back to 1970, the year NOAA was founded. They include NOAA’s reports to Congress, strategic and policy documents, white papers, conference proceedings, Federally-funded scholarly research, and more. While many of these items have historically been available in print formats at Federal depository libraries, they will now be available digitally through the CGP for easier and wider access.

Items the public may find particularly interesting from this collection are:

• Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act (Weather Act) Collection, including documents describing efforts to improve hurricane, tornado, tsunami, and subseasonal to seasonal forecasting
• Endangered Species Act Section 7 Biological Opinions
• Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Restoration Collection, with documents related to NOAA’s response and restoration work in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill NOAA Annual Science Report