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.

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

 Note: Once the holdings feed is set up, OCLC will select all applicable collections according to the data received from the vendor.  

​Contact OCLC Support

  1. OCLC will use your Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) profile information to maintain your library-specific government document collections. If you are not sure what your GPO depository number is, please contact the Government Publishing Office (GPO) support team: https://www.gpo.gov/askgpo
  2. Contact OCLC Support and provide your U.S. Government Publishing Office details to have automated holdings feeds enabled by sending the following sentence: 
    Please create my library-specific government document collections in Collection Manager:
My WorldCat registry ID is: [number]
My GPO depository number is: [number]

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 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 No 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 No Monthly Please verify that your collections have not been manually selected before you proceed to request collection loading.

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.

 Caution: Once your collection has loaded, do not add, delete, or update any of the titles within the collection. If there is an issue with the titles selected or missing from your collection, please contact OCLC Support with examples.  

Check the Activity History or search for your collection

We recommend that you wait until your collection is available before you proceed so that all of the settings will be available in Collection Manager Fundamentals.

The amount of time it takes for your titles to be available depends on the timing of your request, how often your provider sends data, when OCLC loads the data, and the place of your institution's data in a queue. The time for the initial loading process varies from about one week to one month.

 Caution: Once you have requested to have your collections selected automatically, do not add, delete, or update any of the titles within the collection. If there is an issue with the titles selected or missing from your collection, please contact OCLC Support with examples.  

To see if your collection has loaded in the WorldShare interface:

  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. Do one of the following:

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.

Find additional support materials ​

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