When CD-ROMs became popular in the early 1990s, GPO used CD-ROMS quite often to distribute Federal information to depository libraries. Later in the 1990s, the Web became the global medium for content dissemination and GPO stopped distributing CD-ROMS.
In April 2011, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) staff began a review of CD-ROMs distributed on behalf of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). GPO's goal was to determine if equivalent versions exist on Web sites. GPO staff members asked depository librarians to volunteer help with the review, and GPO used the FDLP Community site to collaborate with the volunteers. Librarians compared content from CD-ROMs in their collection to potentially equivalent material on Federal government web sites and/or official partners’ sites. GPO's role was to provide a quality check of the comparison data and provide feedback to project volunteers.
To assist in this review, GPO posted master lists of CD-ROMs to the FDLP Community site’s forum. The master lists contained some duplicate records found in both the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications and DDM2. Here are the most recent versions of the archived master lists.
- [bulleted list of master lists here]
GPO suspended the review effort in April 2012 due to staffing changes.