Stuart M. Basefsky, a reference librarian for the School of Industrial and Labor Relations' Catherwood Library, shows off the Catherwood Electronic Archive, which he directs.
By Darryl Geddes
In a move designed to make U.S. government reports more accessible to a wider population, including scholars and businesses overseas, a Cornell library has been selected as a site for collecting, transmitting and archiving selected fed eral labor reports on the Internet.
This development at Cornell puts libraries in the position of becoming pub lic service publishing houses and underscores their importance in formulating national information policy.
The Martin P. Catherwood Library of the School of Industrial and Labor Rela tions has established the Catherwood Electronic Archive in collaboration with several offices within the U.S. Department of Labor for the dissemination of national reports via the Internet.
"The goal of this initiative is to enable widespread and immediate access of these important documents," said Stuart M. Basefsky, a reference librarian at the Catherwood Library, who directs the electronic archive.
The major advantage to such a partnership, according to Basefsky, is that these documents are now available to a much broader audience.
"Scholars around the world can now access these documents from their desk top," Basefsky said. "The partnership creates a library without walls. We're able to serve many more individuals than
those who walk into our facility here at Cornell, and the government is able to make its work available to more people."
Statistics show just how in demand such materials are. According to fig ures maintained by Catherwood Library, the already-archived Glass Ceil ing Commission report has been accessed 3,672 times from Jan. 6 through Oct. 13, 1995, for an average of 13 files transmitted daily from places as far away as Australia.
Posting these reports on the Catherwood Electronic Archive means such documents are available to library users sooner. "There would be a signifi cant delay from the time the U.S. government released the report to the time we could make the document available to our library users," Basefsky noted. "Thanks to this relationship with the Department of Labor, we are able to get these documents on-line within 24 hours after they are released."
Relationships, like the one between the Catherwood Library and the U.S. Department of Labor, highlight the new role libraries can play in collecting, disseminating and archiving government information.
"This initiative is an excellent example of public service privatization," Basefsky said. "From a public-policy standpoint, this sort of privatization be comes a major pay back from libraries for all the government funding they have received in the past and expect to receive in the future....
"Clearly there are advantages for both the federal government and libraries in fostering partnerships such as the one between the Catherwood Library and the U.S. Department of Labor," he said. "This partnership is but one way libraries can take a proactive approach to helping con struct a national information policy."
With more than 193,000 volumes, Catherwood Library contains the most extensive collection of industrial and labor relations materials of any university library in the world and is second overall only to the combined collections of the Library of Congress and the U.S. Department of Labor Library.
To access the Catherwood Electronic Archive via the World Wide Web: <http: //www.ilr.cornell.edu/library/e_archive>. To access the archive via FTP Site: <ftp.ilr.cornell>. To access the archive via GOPHER: <gopher.ilr.cornell.edu>.