Appalachian Regional Commission: Home

The University of Kentucky serves as a Center of Excellence (COE) for the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) as one of the commitments they have made as a member of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) and as the Federal Regional Depository Library for the state of Kentucky.  In order to expand the number of COEs for federal agency publications, many of the federal depository libraries in the southeastern states are participating in a project called the "Collaborative Federal Depository Program" (CFDP) under the leadership of ASERL and built upon the existing Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) administered by the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO).

This program seeks to provide workable solutions to address the increasing cost of managing, preserving, and providing access to large collections of Federal government publications through the creation of several comprehensive collections, known as "Centers of Excellence", of U.S. government information from each Federal government agency. Built upon the foundation of existing holdings at Federal Depository libraries, these collections will become more complete with assistance from both Regionals, libraries who collect government information comprehensively, and Selectives, libraries who collect government information selectively, in the ten ASERL states.

Centers of Excellence will:

• inventory holdings and ensure accurate cataloging and holdings records for the extant collection
• actively replace damaged or lost pieces,
• seek to fill holes in their collections, as necessary,
• provide active preservation for the collection,
• catalog the pieces that they own on OCLC, the worldwide union catalog for libraries, and identify them as the archival copy,&
• participate in GPO's program to set holdings on OCLC for Regionals free of charge, if eligible,
• enhance the visibility of, and accessibility to, their collection through digitization of holdings or linking to available public domain digital copies, as feasible,
• actively participate in ILL/Document Delivery agreements, and
• provide expert reference service for and promote the use of their collection.

ASERL believes creating these COEs will result in more reliable and predictable access to Federal publications for all libraries and citizens in the Southeastern states by specifying which Federal Depository libraries have the most complete holdings for each agency. ASERL appreciates the effort that all service points at their “centers” are putting into making sure their users know about the availability of these rich resources.

Contact information:
UK contact: Amy Laub-Carroll

ASERL contact: Cheryle Cole-Bennett, (ccole-bennett@aserl.org), Coordinator, Collaborative Federal Depositories Program. Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL).

U. S. Government Publishing Office

The University of Kentucky has two other research guides to U.S. Government documents that can be found via the links below.