ABSTRACT

The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries is exploring options for collaborative services and collection analysis for federal government publications in order to improve public access to those collections. The Collaborative Federal Depository Program has developed “Centers of Excellence” (COE), representing multiple complete collections of publications for each federal agency. Working together to create a distributed print retention program, southeastern depository libraries agreed to collect, maintain, and provide access to publications for specific government agencies. The authors discuss the development of the COE model and the expected impact of a regionally based distributed print archive for government documents, and provide an implementation case study.