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OCLC Support

GPO - U.S. Government Publishing Office (Fundamentals)

OCLC will use your Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) profile information to create and maintain knowledge base collections in Collection Manager for your government document titles.

Get started

If you need access to Collection Manager (the Metadata tab in the WorldShare interface), follow the steps to Create a Collection Manager account. The instructions will tell you to complete a Request WorldShare Collection Manager form.

Request an Automatic Holdings Feed 

Verify that your collections have not been manually selected

If your institution has manually selected a collection in full, OCLC will not overwrite your selections. Before the initial load of holdings from your provider, we recommend that you verify that the collection has not been manually selected.

 Notes: 

  • Follow the steps under See if your collection loaded to verify that an Automatic Holdings Feed has not already been setup for this collection. 
  • Once the holdings feed is set up, OCLC will select all applicable collections according to the data received from the vendor.  
Verify that your collections have not been manually selected

Before the initial load of your collections, please:

  1. Sign in to the WorldShare interface at your library's WorldShare URL https://yourlibrary.share.worldcat.org/wms [Replace yourlibrary with your library's identifier].
  2. Navigate to Metadata > Collection Manager Fundamentals and locate the search box.
  3. Select Collections as the Data Type and All Collections as the Scope. Click Search.
  4. Once you have returned the collection in a search, perform one of the following:
    • If the collection is selected in FULL: You will need to deselect it. Our system will not be able to overwrite the collection with the title data directly from your provider. If you have holdings set in WorldCat, de-selecting the collection will remove these holdings. Holdings will be added after OCLC loads the collection (if WorldCat Holdings is enabled in Institution Settings)
    • If the collection is partially selected to reflect a subset of the titles available in the collections: The system will overwrite your title selections and collection data. If you want to preserve the title selections and collection data before OCLC overwrites it, do so before making a request for your collection to be loaded by OCLC. Within your collection, navigate to Titles > More Actions. Use the option to Download titles in local holdings and choose a format to download a spreadsheet of your title data
    • If the collection is NOT selected: Proceed to the instructions How to request an Automatic Holdings Feed

How to request an Automatic Holdings Feed

 Note: Be sure your Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) item selection profile matches what your library wishes to receive moving forward.


  1. OCLC will use your Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) item selection profile to maintain your library-specific government document collections. As your FDLP item selection profile evolves over time with new selections and deselections, OCLC will update new content to match the changes. Old content previously selected will not be affected by changes to the item selection profile. If you are not sure what your GPO (that is, Federal depository library) number is or would like more information about the item numbers on your profile and how to change them, or to learn more about them, please contact the Government Publishing Office (GPO) support team: https://www.gpo.gov/askgpo.
  2. From the Collection Manager Fundamentals home page, select the Add feed button. 
  3. Select The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO).
  4. Enter the Depository Number.
  5. Click Submit.

The feed request status will update to Pending as it is waiting for its initial provider update. 

It can take up to one month before your government document collections are active and viewable in the WorldShare interface

See if your collection loaded

Collection names and IDs

There are many collections in the global WorldCat knowledge base. Use the collection information to help you find the relevant collections. When you search in Collection Manager, try entering a root word and an asterisk (*) as a truncation operator. For example: U.S. Government*

The below collections are available for an Automatic Holdings Feed:

Collection name(s) Collection ID(s) Demand-driven acquisition collections? Frequency provider sends OCLC data Notes about the collection
U.S. Government Documents - Electronic govdocs.govdocse Nein Monthly Please verify that your collections have not been manually selected before you proceed to request collection loading.
U.S. Government Documents - Non-electronic govdocs.govdocsp Nein Monthly Please verify that your collections have not been manually selected before you proceed to request collection loading.

 Caution: Once your collection has loaded, do not add or update any of the titles within the collection. Over time, item numbers will be deselected from your item selection profile. When this happens, your holdings will not be removed from corresponding records in OCLC. If you remove a small number of item selections from the FDLP, you may want to deselect the corresponding titles manually from your GPO collections. For a large number of removals, it may be a better option to reset the entire collection so that you only receive records associated with your current or updated item selection profile. To do that, please contact OCLC Support to coordinate the process. If there are other issues with the titles selected or missing from your collection,  please contact OCLC Support with examples. 

 

Collection details

OCLC has divided your titles into two collections: Electronic titles and non-electronic titles. This division allows you to make choices in your settings and customizations per format. For example, you can choose to have MARC records for your electronic collection and for your non-electronic titles output in unique, separate files. Likewise, you could add unique public notes for display in WorldCat Discovery in each collection.

These collections are updated monthly by harvesting all records that GPO has cataloged in WorldCat. This harvest is typically done on the last Friday of each month, with the collections being updated shortly afterwards. To be eligible to be included in either GPO collection, the records must first have a valid 074:a field. Beyond that, to be included in the U.S. Government Documents – Electronic collection, a WorldCat record must have a purl.fdlp.gov/GPO/ or purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/ URL in the 856 field, and has to be an electronic format type, such as an eBook, Online Map, Online Video, Website, or eJournal. To be included in the U.S. Government Documents – Non-electronic collection, a record simply needs to be in a print format, such as a Print Book, Journal, Photograph, etc.

Check the Activity History or search for your collection

On the Collection Manager Fundamentals home screen, the Automatic holdings feeds tab shows all the available holdings feeds. Automatic holdings feeds that have been processed and are ongoing have the status of Active. For more information about editing, pausing, or removing an automatic holdings feed, see About Automatic Holdings Feeds

Automatic Holdings Feeds status descriptions:

Status Description
Pending The feed request has been submitted and is waiting for its initial provider update.
Manual only The feed is set to be updated manually only and does not receive provider updates. This setting can be changed at the Institution level.
Paused The feed has been paused and is not receiving provider updates. Users can resume the feed using the Actions menu in the Automatic Holdings Feed view on the Collection Manager home page.
Active The feed is functioning normally and receiving updates.
Updating The feed is currently processing an update. This status typically appears briefly during the update process.
At the Institution level: 
  1. Sign in to the WorldShare interface at your library's WorldShare URL (https://yourlibrary.share.worldcat.org/wms [Replace yourlibrary with your library's identifier]).
  2. Navigate to Metadata Collection Manager Fundamentals.
  3. Under the Search section in the left navigation, select Activity History from the Data Type drop-down. Select My Institution's History under Scope
  4.  Leave the Search Term(s) box blank and click Search
  5. From the search results screen, use the Filter by drop-down and select Loads & Feeds. From the resulting drop-down box, select Automatic Holdings Feed.
  6. Click Filter
  7. The resulting list will show the collections currently loaded by Automatic Holdings Feed. 

Refer to Collection Manager Activity History for more information. 

At the Collection level:
  1. Sign in to the WorldShare interface at your library's WorldShare URL (https://yourlibrary.share.worldcat.org/wms [Replace yourlibrary with your library's identifier]).
  2. Navigate to Metadata Collection Manager Fundamentals.
  3. Search for and select the collection.
    1. From the collection:
      1. Select the collection and expand Holdings and MARC Records.
      2. Under Data Sources, the provider will be selected under Selected data sources only

        OR
         
    2. From the collection:
      1. Select Collection History.
      2. Use the Filter by drop-down to select Loads & Feeds. From the resulting drop-down box, select Automatic Holdings Feeds.
      3. Click Filter.
      4. The resulting list will show any Automatic Holdings Feeds uploads for the collection. 

Configure institution settings

  1. Sign in to the WorldShare interface at your library's WorldShare URL.
    • Replace yourlibrary with your library's identifier: https://yourlibrary.share.worldcat.org/wms
  2. Navigate to Metadata > Collection Manager > Institution Settings.
  3. Configure the following settings:

OCLC Symbol

Verify that your OCLC Symbol is selected

Proxy and Authentication

Enter your proxy information so off-campus patrons are directed through a proxy server

Reports (WorldCat holdings reports and/or Records reports)

Enable emailed reports

Choose the instructions that apply to your needs

Manage WorldCat holdings

Collection Manager provides the convenience of automatically maintaining your holdings in WorldCat as titles are added, deleted or updated in your collections.

  1. Navigate to Institution Settings > WorldCat Holdings.
  2. Set Maintain holdings in WorldCat to Yes.
    Now that you have enabled WorldCat Holdings in the institution settings, the collection-level setting for knowledge base collections will be enabled by default.

Use collection data with other services

Display full-text links, elevate links from a specific provider, and more.