Standing Committee On Official Publications (SCOOP)

I represent CIG on SCOOP which is the body monitoring and looking after LIS interest in offical publishing. At its meeting last month several issues came up which are worth noting and which some may wish to comment on.

The Cabinet office ‘Transformational Government’ report had been made public on the day of our meeting. It reports inter alia that 951 government websites have been identified for closure and 461 have already gone. SCOOP is less bothered by the idea of closing them down- the content is often a duplication of that found elsewhere or the site relates to a specific campaign. However we will be lobbying on the issue of proper archiving. The sites should not be allowed to drift into the ether without someone keeping a copy. One obvious place to preserve them is the UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC).

A similar discussion took place around Home Office statistical series. These are only erratically appearing in print and since we understand that the Home Office has a policy of removing material from its website after two years there is more cause for concern as to how it will be possible to do historical research etc.
The BL has set up the Digital Object Management (DOM) programme to create the technical infrastructure underpinning its digital library. The first major component of the DOM System to be implemented was the storage layer, which enables the BL to store digital objects and preserve them in perpetuity. This now stores 'handheld' digital items received under the Voluntary Deposit of Electronic Publications scheme, which has run since 2000, and recordings created by the Sound Archive. Work is currently underway to implement an ingest module, based on Tessella software. This will include developing the interface between DOM and the Integrated Library Management System (Aleph). Handheld digital material received through VDEP is catalogued and may be accessed through British Library Integrated Catalogue and requested in the reading rooms.

Statute law database. Having been a standing item on SCOOP’s agenda in the 20 odd years it has taken to develop this; it is now publicly and freely available. Those who have looked at it think it is pretty good, though not without flaws, especially for non-expert (i.e. non-legal) users. Any comments gratefully received as SLD will be monitored for a while by SCOOP.

Code of practice on Local Authority official publications. The draft COP drawn up by NFER is being released for testing. Once everyone is happy it is likely to get a certain amount of publicity as the Local Government Association seems keen on it.

Public Bill Committees
Standing Committees have now been abolished. Instead all Bills will go to a Public Bill Committee which will be enabled to take evidence on certain bills. There will be no short form of citation. We will have to refer to the debates of (or evidence to) the Dogs Bill committee. There will be no numbering and it is expected that TSO will issue Bill committee bound volumes in alphabetical order. Now there is one for the cataloguing community…