Whether or not you check in U.S. government documents depends on whether
you are a Federal Depository Library or not.  If you are, you are bound by
your agreement as a depository to provide a piece level record for every
piece you receive. In the old days, that probably meant marking a paper
Kardex of some sort that you got the piece; now, it's more likely to mean a
bibliographic and item record in an online catalog (though not always).

You are correct that gov docs staff in some FDLP libraries are spending
much time on tangible resource checkin and not as much (not enough?) time
getting URLs into their catalogs (either for things they own in a tangible
format or for those they don't).  But since these pieces are actually the
property of the federal government, they are bound by different rules and
we don't have the choice to not check them in somehow.

Kim
_______________________________________
Kim Maxwell
Serials Acquisitions Librarian
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT Libraries, Room 14E-210
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
phone: 1-617-253-7028
fax:   1-617-253-2464
email: kmaxwell@mit.edu

At 09:17 AM 8/11/2004 -0400, Josephine Williamson wrote:
>I've been following the recent discussion that revisits the question of
>dropping check-in for periodical and serials subscriptions.  I have a
>question that is an off-shoot (at least I think it is) of this
>discussion.  Is anyone out there applying this same logic to the way you
>approach the receipt of U.S. documents serials?  Documents receipts is
>in our Acquisitions Department and we are becoming increasingly
>concerned about the amount of time and effort being spent maintaining
>bibliographic records for quite mundane serial titles that are now
>easily available to all citizens with a Google search.  We formerly
>received these titles in microform and considered ourselves the holder
>of vital and hard-to-find resources.  The internet has changed that,
>especially for annual reports of government agencies and publications
>which are being broken down into multiple parts to have PURLs assigned
>for each part.
>
>So, to my way of thinking, it's a reversal of Rick's theory.  The paper
>and microfilm need our attention but a lot of the electronic does not
>need to be in our OPAC.
>
>Anyone else considering this?   Have you established guidelines for what
>you will and will not add to your OPAC?
>
>Josie Williamson
>Head, Acquisitions Dept.
>University of Delaware Library