Whither Goest Government Documents? A Story and a Study

Abstract

A study was conducted to determine the findability of known print U.S. government documents using five different resources: the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP), in-house library catalog, library discovery service, HathiTrust, and Google. Overall, Google was the most effective finding tool, followed by the library discovery service, the in-house library catalog, Catalog of Government Publications, and HathiTrust. Three-quarters of documents were available full-text via Google. Implications of the online availability of government publications on the need for large print document collections and the continuing reconsideration of library spaces are discussed as are future studies.