Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Availability Of U.S. Government Depository Publications On The World Wide Web, Robert Lopresti, Marcia Gorin

Western Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

In order to explore the prevalence of federal government information on the World Wide Web, two random samples were taken of material sent to federal depository libraries in the first half of the year 2000. Over the course of eighteen months four separate attempts were made to find each of the sample publications on the World Wide Web using a variety of search engines. During the first attempt, one to five months after the material was sent to depository libraries, 47% of the publications in the sample were located on the Web. During the final and most successful attempt, 18 …