As requested by several of you, here are the responses I received
regarding retaining the "Calendar of the U.S. House of Representatives
and History of Legislation" and "Calendar of Business, Senate".
I posted the question to the law-lib list and the govdoc listserv too.
I received 9-10 responses. Even though each one was stated a little
differently, the response was the same - throw out everything except
what GPO regulations state you should keep (HOUSE CALENDAR -
"Each issue superseded previous day's. Keep latest Monthly issue for
index. All daily issues superseded by final ed. for session, then
final ed. for Congress", SENATE CALENDAR - "Keep issues for current
Congress and one year past the adjournment of the Congress").
*The decision of our law library - follow the crowd and toss everything
we could under GPO rules (and there was much rejoicing)!
Again, many thanks for the helpful responses I received.
===================================
Now, for those of you who want to see the exact responses I received,
they are as follows:
"I'm probably not the first one to tell you--we keep only the final for
any given Congress for the House calendar, since the material cumulates.
We have finals for the Senate calendar back to the 98th Congress; I
believe prior to that a final was not done. It may be ignorace on my
part, but I never use these; I get the material from other sources"
Carol L. Moody
St. Louis University Law Library
"Hi - At Ohio State's law library, we discard the daily issues at the
end of the Congress, looking for the FINAL editions, which provide a
cumulation of information as well as some numbers that come in handy
such as total number of bills introduces, etc. I would like to bind
these final issues as well because of their value."
Melanie Putnam
OSU Law Library
"If you have a regional depository nearby where you can get
documents quickly to your user I would seriously consider removing it
from your collection. Be sure to ask you local nearest regional if they
need of what you're going to dump <makes for good future PR>"
Brian Striman
U. of Neb. Law Library
"Did anybody answer your question? We keep the last House calendar
from each Congress (every 2 years). I should say Final calendar.
It is useful for legislative history research, and it cumulates for
the whole Congress, so you can keep the most recent for the current
session too. We keep the Senate calendar for the current session. You
have to keep them all because they don't cumulate. For that reason
they are hard to use for historical purposes. I think we may toss
them at the end of each Session. You can go back to the House one
year later to find stuff on a bill's chronology. There may be
privately published stuff that does this better now."
John D. Moore
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Library
"As a legislative librarian in a private firm, I don't keep the House
and Senate calendars. I do think it's important to hang on to the
individual House and Senate committee calendars, because they're the
definitive source for what the committee has published. The history
of legislation is also available in the Congressional Record index,
not to mention many other sources."
Val O. Holley
Name of firm not given
"I have been a Legislative Librarian for for only about a year, but I have
never had any use for the Calendars from previous years, and have no
idea how to access the information when doing research, but I have
been told they can be invaluable so I should keep them. I do get the
Calendars every day and have found them to be useful for up to the minute
research, though I only keep the current Calendar for that day, throwing
the old one out, and then saving the final Calendar for each year.
I would be interested in any information you come up with on this
issue"
Elizabeth LeDoux
Dickstein, Shapiro & Morin, LLP
"In Appendix C of the Instructions to Depository Libraries, you'll find
that retention schedule of the Senate Calendar is the current Congress
and one year past the adjournment of the Congress; retention schedule for
the House Calendar is "Each issue superseded previous day's. Keep latest
Monday issue for index. All daily issues superseded by final edition
for session, then final edition for Congress."
Sharon Blackburn
Texas Tech University School of Law Library
"If one retains the final cumulative edition for the Congress, that will
be sufficient for a hardcopy historical reference on legislation
considered during that Congress"
Rick McKinney, Legislative Librarian
Federal Reserve Board
"We keep the final version (for all congresses) of the house calendars.
For the current congress, we keep the latest Monday of the House
calendars only."
Andrea Sevetson, GovDocs Librarian
University of California
"House: According to the Superseded List, you should keep only the
latest Monday issue plus the latest daily issue. You should also keep
the FINAL editions which are issues at the end of the congress.
"Senate: Keep issues for current congress and one year past the
adjournment of the congress
"The Superseded List, which is part of the Depository Instructions spell
out which materials depositories can discard. We follow those guidelines
pretty carefully because discarding documents outside these guidelines
can end with a depository losing their depository status."
Coleen Parmar, Coordinator Government Documents
Bowling Green State University
===================================================================
Ann Smith Phone (706) 542-5053
Library Associate Fax (706) 542-5001
University of Georgia Law Library absmith@uga.cc.uga.edu
Athens, GA 30602
===================================================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 14 2007 - 20:49:02 PST