I had a student come to me looking for a federal document called “Population representation in the military services.” She was doing research into the history of enlistment in the armed forces and was interested in finding statistics on the number of enlistments and applications to enlist per state from 1985 – 2000. The report has supposedly been published since 1970, but unfortunately was only available online from 1997 forward on the DoD site and most library catalogs only had the link.

It appeared after much digging that this report was never distributed to libraries in the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) even though it was a Congressionally mandated report, reports that are required by statute to be submitted by Federal agencies to the Senate, the House of Representatives, or to Congressional committees or subcommittees (check out the long saga of Congressionally mandated reports which have historically been hard to find but after many years of advocacy by government transparency groups, librarians and others are not required to be sent to GPO!).

After consultation with my many govinfo librarian colleagues on the govdoc-l Listserv — the amazing hive mind of govinfo librarians around the country! — I was able to piece together reports back to 1983 from our own collection (which were not cataloged but buried in the microfiche of the American Statistical Index (ASI) which is at least indexed in the subscription database Proquest Statistical Insight), the agency itself, a couple of editions available on the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) database, and a solid run in paper back to 1983 at the Pentagon Library. There are still a couple of gaps in the series, but I have at least been able to piece together 1983 – present. I requested the Pentagon Library volumes (1983 – 1997) and Stanford Library’s awesome digitization services team are in the process of scanning them. After the volumes have been scanned, I’ll send the files to the Government Publishing Office (GPO) through their “unreported documents” process (the process whereby federal publications that should be but are not for some reason in the FDLP’s National Collection can be collected, cataloged, and made available to the public).

I do hope that GPO’s new Congressionally Mandated Reports collection will help to solve the issue of access to these important reports that are often lost in the ether. But it will take the dogged work of countless govinfo librarians to continue to hunt these unreported documents down for students, researchers, journalists, and the public.