ABSTRACT
In April 1998, the Documents Data Miner (DDM) was announced as a partnership site of the Government Printing Office’s Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), with an enhanced prototype 164version (DDM2) announced in October 2001. Documents Data Miner 2 is located on the Internet at https://govdoc.wichita.edu/ddm2. DDM was originally developed in 1995–1996 as a research project which attempted to eliminate labor-intensive tasks in processing and collection development of government documents at Wichita State University’s Libraries by developing in-house technology, resulting in a relational database built using Paradox. The development team quickly understood the potential for mounting a nationally useful set of tools on the Internet, utilizing Government Printing Office (GPO) legacy metadata which were emerging simultaneously as files available for download from the Federal Bulletin Board. The data mining capabilities of DDM/DDM2 incorporate tabular data available in the List of Classes, Discontinued List, Superseded List, Item Lister, Federal Depositories Library Directory, the GPO Shipping Lists, and GPO MARC Records. Union lists of documents are available to users categorized by geographic area (in miles), by state, and by national region. Use data collected by WebTrends documents over 11,000 unique users of the DDM2 set of Web tools in 2003. The emergence of the Documents Data Miner products single-handedly moved issues of collection development, processing and cataloging of government documents from a 19th century paper-based environment to a 21st century data mining model.
