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Ontario Legislative Library Catalogue: Hidden GL Gem

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My favourite place for finding government publications and press releases which have disappeared from their respective department websites is the Ontario Legislative Library catalogue. One can run a simple search from the entry page:

Excerpt of Ontario Legislative Library simple catalogue search page

or delve down a level to find the Guided Search and Command Search pages:

Excerpt of Ontario Legislative Library catalogue guided search screen

The fantastic staff at the Legislative Library (“The Leg”) make a concerted effort to capture as many Ontario government documents and reports as possible and house them on their own “eArchive” servers. Access is directly from the catalogue record:

Example of catalogue record with link to document housed on Ontario Legislative Library server

Are other Legislative/Parliamentary libraries doing this as well? Any other organizations?

Comments

  1. Caron Rollins
    August 14th, 2006 at 12:24 am

    Yes, other legislature libraries are archiving government publications.
    Two sites I used for archived electronic gov pubs use are the catalog of the Legislature Library of British
    Columbia http://www.llbc.leg.bc.ca and the catlaog of the
    Library of Alberta
    http://hip.assembly.ab.ca/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=public2&reloadxsl=true#focus

    Publications from the federal government of Canada are found in two
    e-collections, the DSP E-collection
    http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/Epubs/epubs-e.html

    and the Libraries and Archives Canada e-collection
    http://amicus.collectionscanada.ca/electroniccollection-bin/Main/AdvSearch?coll=11&l=0&v=1

    Recall the DSP Weekly Checklist of government
    publications, the listing used by full and selective depositories for Canadian federal publications?
    What’s new is batch files of MARC21 records for each checklist, including print and
    electronic titles both book length and pamphlet lenght.

    Pamphlets are definitely grey literature, and since the demise of vertical
    “pamphlet” files, not collected by libraries. The provision of readily
    accessible MARC21 records for the electronic version of these pamphlets
    brings accessibility back to an important vehicle used by government to disseminate policy information.
    Current issues of the “Weeky Checklist” are linked to from: http://publications.gc.ca/control/publicHomePage

  2. Connie Crosby
    August 14th, 2006 at 11:36 am

    Brilliant! Thanks so much for all the additional information, Caron. I’m sure everyone will find this most helpful.

    Cheers,
    Connie