Brooklyn College's Library houses the largest federal depository in the borough, as well as a significant collection of New York State documents.
· New York State Documents
The services associated with this State program remained abysmal: few documents were available for selection, and most of these only irregularly. A number of documents were scanned and made available electronically, but the State used the less common .tiff format as their archival standard, requiring readers to download a special viewer which many are either reluctant to do, or cannot do.
· Federal Documents
The long-promised transition to an electronic federal depository continued; nonetheless, Government Publications staff added several thousand individual documents to the collection in a range of physical formats, including paper, microfiche, and CD-ROM. This makes answering questions about new editions or agency publications an interesting proposition: not knowing which documents appear in which formats, staff can no longer simply check the shelf and be certain they have given readers the correct answer. Increasingly their best choice is to go directly to the agency or sub-agency's Web page, hoping that the requested item is electronic full-text and searchable. GOVDOC-L, the government documents e-mail discussion group, remains an important resource in keeping up with government publishing in its many formats. The participation of GPO staff on the list allows member libraries to get timely responses to their questions and concerns.
· Documents on CD-ROM Migrate to the Web
The new Windows-based CD-ROM interfaces have proven much more reliable than their DOS predecessors. However, as the year progressed most of the products we own migrated to the Web, leaving us with only a small but essential core of titles still on disk.