Farewell to the U.S. Federal Docs Registry Interface

The U.S. Federal Documents Registry database began in 2013 with the goal of creating a comprehensive inventory of items published by the U.S. government. This project supported our HathiTrust U.S. Federal Documents program’s goal to identify materials that had yet to be digitized.  Although this database was primarily intended to support HathiTrust’s own collection analysis, we have offered a public search interface.

After determining that the public interface has been rarely used, we have decided to discontinue that service effective April 24. The U.S. Federal Documents collection is still maintained in the HathiTrust Digital Library. We will continue to maintain the Registry database itself, which has high value to many HathiTrust member libraries and has been used to identify U.S. federal documents that are held by libraries but not yet digitized and deposited into the HathiTrust repository. We will continue to leverage the database in collection analysis work with our member libraries. We will explore future service models for providing access to the Registry data, and welcome comments or suggestions from our members at support@hathitrust.org.