Federal Government Documents Tutorial
Monthly Catalog
The Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications has
been
published since 1895. You use various indexes to the Monthly
Catalog to obtain an entry number (or page reference) on which the
bibliographic information for a document of interest is printed. Among
the data given for each entry is the SuDoc number for the publication.
Next look up the SuDoc number in the federal documents shelflist to determine
whether that call number is available in the library -- in paper, microfiche,
or CD-Rom. The Monthly Catalog is temporarily shelved in the
Reference - U.S. Docs area in the second floor bookstacks, north, overlooking
Hillsborough Street.
Over a period of more than one hundred years the Monthly
Catalog has had its share of changes.
2006 to the present
In March 2006 GPO entered the 21st century with the introduction of
its electronic Catalog of U.S. Government
Publications (CGP). For best results, be sure to use its Advanced
Search page. The CGP includes records for documents cataloged after June
1976. You can search the database using Boolean operators and limiting
features. Its results screens have links to complete bibliographic
records in a tagged MARC layout, and links to .pdf versions of documents on
GPO's purl server. Users can sort results sets quickly by author, title,
year published, and SuDoc number. The CGP is a great leap forward over
GPO's earlier attempts to provide electronic bibliographic control.
1996 to 2005
In 1996 the printed Monthly Catalog shrank in size when
GPO began to produce a CD-Rom version of its bibliography. DO NOT use
the printed issues of the Monthly Catalog (1996 to the present) to do
any sort of search. The bibliographic portions of the catalog have only
brief records with little more information than issuing agency, SuDoc number,
title, date published, and pagination. The index is a single keyword in
context index that does not cumulate.
GPO finally in 1996 began to produce the same sort of electronic
product that a number of commercial firms had been compiling since the
mid-1970s. This bibliography, titled the Catalog of U.S. Government
Publications (CGP), was a GPO Access tool. But it only included
documents cataloged from 1994 forward, and posed no competition to the
commercial products.
July 1976 - 1995
In the mid-1970s libraries were seeking ways to share data about
the books that would appear in multiple libraries' catalogs. If one
library cataloged a book and shared that data with a network of other
libraries, then many libraries would benefit by being able to put a copy of
that same title on their shelves more efficiently.
A standard format to record the data you expect to find in library
catalogs was developed, called MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging)
records. GPO began creating MARC cataloging records to use to produce
the Monthly Catalog with the July 1976 issue, and stored the
electronic
records for the publications that have been cataloged since that date in a
huge database called OCLC. GPO records are a small subset of the OCLC
database.
Commercial firms have used these electronic GPO records to create
cumulative databases of federal document publications since July 1976, but for
twenty years GPO only used the electronic data created by that office as
source material for the compilation of a printed Monthly
Catalog.
It was an impressive publication.
Each Monthly Catalog issue from this period was more than
an inch thick. In the first section the bibliography reproduced in full
all the cataloging data pertaining to each listed publication. These
elements in each entry remain the most significant:
| entry number |
Entry from page 1 of July 1976 Monthly
Catalog
[View a larger
image] |
| SuDoc number |
| author |
| title |
| pagination |
| subject headings |
Each of these Monthly Catalog issues included a number of
indexes which were cumulated annually. The indexes were also cumulated
in paper for two five-year periods (July 1976-1980, and 1981-1985). You
may consult indexes that are arranged by
| author |
Entries from page I-2381 of 1992 Monthly
Catalog |
| title |
| subject |
| series/report number |
| contract number |
| stock number |
| classification number |
| title keyword |
Each of the index entries contains the document's full title and
SuDoc number, along with a unique entry number that allows you to locate the
complete cataloging record in the Monthly Catalog's bibliographic
section.
July 1924 - June 1976
There is no electronic version of the Monthly Catalog
index
for the period 1895 - July 1976. You must use the printed indexes
described below if you wish to search for federal documents issued during this
time frame.
Bibliographic references in monthly issues were presented in a
concise paragraph style. The same significant pieces of information,
entry number, SuDoc number, author, title, pagination, and subject headings,
were included in the entries.
Entries from January 1976 Monthly
Catalog
Unique entry numbers for documents recorded in the Monthly
Catalog were introduced in July 1924. Prior to this time citations
in the indexes gave reference only to the page on which the bibliographic
information for a document was to be found.
There is only a single, combined index available for searching the
Monthly Catalog during the period 1895 - June 1976. Like the
more
sophisticated indexes from the period beginning in the later 1970s, the
combined index was issued monthly, and cumulated annually. Multi-year
cumulations were also made for the years 1941-1950, 1951-1960, 1961-1965,
1966-1970, 1971-6/1976.
The index entries for these early Monthly Catalogs were
compiled manually by staff at GPO, and used a mix of entry formats. Most
common were main subjects and subject subdivisions, as "Census: business", or
"Census: governments", used for Census of Business and Census of Governments
entries. These are followed by specific volume titles from the two
censuses.
Entries from Combined Monthly Catalog
[View a larger
image]
Another commonly used index technique used during this period is
shown by the entry
Census records, your name is somewhere, 1912
This represents a title, "Your name is somewhere (in) Census
records," for which the indexer chose a significant title word as a subject
term. The title was permuted to bring "Census" to the primary position,
the next word in the title became the subject subdivision (Census: records),
and the first portion of the title was moved to the end of the title
string. This sort of index is now called a KWOC index, a Key Word
Out-of-Context index.
1895 - June 1924
The Monthly Catalog's indexing for its first thirty years
used the same single, combined index as described above. Index
references to the bibliographic sections of the catalog for this period are to
pages, rather than to specific entries. You need to browse the titles on
a page to find the one you are tracing from the index.
In this period entries in the original Monthly Catalog
issues did not include the SuDoc numbers of documents. The Hill Library
set of the Monthly Catalog contains reprint volumes from this period
enhanced by the "Classes added edition" which added the SuDoc numbers
throughout the volumes.
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