Government Documents: Federal Documents

This guide is to provide information on state and federal government resources.

About this Page

This page contains information on the background of the FDLP, as well as links to helpful sources.

Types of Depository Libraries

There are two types of depository libraries, selective and regional.

Selective depositories are able to choose what types of items they receive. There are guidelines for how long the library should keep an item, depending on what it is. Linscheid Library is one of sixteen selective depositories in the state of Oklahoma.

Regional libraries manage the selective depositories in their states. They receive every title sent out by the Government Publishing Office, and they have much stricter guidelines on keeping those items. Some states have two regional libraries, some have one, and some have none or the regional is shared by more than one state. Oklahoma has one regional at Oklahoma State University.

Federal Government Links

FDLP libguides
A list of information guides provided by the Government Publishing Office (GPO), the agency that manages the FDLP. There are also guides provided by the FDLP community (opens a new tab).

GPO's govinfo
- This link opens in a new window
Free public access to the full text of official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government, provided by the U.S. Government Publishing Office.
Catalog of U.S. Government Publications
- This link opens in a new window
A finding tool for federal publications that includes descriptive records for historical and current publications, providing direct links to documents available online.

additional links

Resources from OSU
This link from ECU's regional library at OSU provides links to information on a variety of topics, including how to cite government documents (opens a new tab).