Designing and Marketing a LibGuide for Presidential Papers

Abstract

When I joined the faculty at the Fred J. Taylor Library at the University of Arkansas at Monticello (UAM) in July 2019, I became the coordinator of our institution’s Federal Depository Library Program and Arkansas Documents repositories. As I began inspecting our collections, I discovered that documents were dispersed throughout the library. Though the library has a designated Government Documents Collection cataloged under the SuDoc classification scheme, numerous documents were cataloged under the Library of Congress classification as well. Compounding this issue, documents classified under LC were distributed across various collections. The distribution of government documents across multiple collections is not unique to UAM, and is a common problem among FDLP depositories. Having government documents classified under different schemes and shelved in multiple collections can lead to discrepancies in cataloging, particularly as personnel change over time. Finding multiple split-cataloged series in our collections convinced me that, with rare exception, documents should be consolidated into a revamped Government Documents Collection.