COLLECTION AREA
New Hampshire State Government Publications
GENERAL PURPOSE
Dartmouth is a depository library for New Hampshire state publications. Under the state law establishing the depository system (effective 21 July 1973), state agencies are required to produce twenty-five copies of their printed documents; these documents are forwarded to the State Library, which distributes them to the designated depository libraries. Before the depository system became law, Dartmouth acquired state government publications on an individual basis from the various agencies. (Some New Hampshire legislative publications are not available as depository items and are purchased individually by the library.) State law requires that depository libraries provide "reasonable service" of the documents collection without charge and that the libraries catalog the material in an "acceptable" format.The collection supports the instructional and research needs of Dartmouth undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty, and is a source of information for many other library users within and beyond the College community.
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE PROGRAM
New Hampshire documents are used by students, faculty, and others in all subject disciplines and programs.
GENERAL SUBJECT BOUNDARIES
The heaviest demand is for statistical and analytical publications on socioeconomic, cultural, and historical matters. Various administrative offices on campus make extensive use of the collection, particularly legal materials.
GEOGRAPHIC AREAS
Publications deal with issues and policies concerning the state as a whole. Many publications supply information on counties and towns as well.
TYPES OF MATERIAL COLLECTED
Publications include monographs, serials, and maps.
FORMAT OF MATERIALS COLLECTED
Materials are acquired primarily in hard copy; very few state publications are produced in microform. We occasionally acquire publications on CD or videocassette. There is online access to New Hampshire government information, although not publications as such, via the state’s home page.Depository shipments arrive about once a month. The bibliographer in charge of New Hampshire government publications sees that issues of serials are sent to Acquisitions (Serials) to be checked in and that new titles, serial and monographic, are cataloged, if appropriate. Cataloged items are housed in Baker or appropriate associated libraries. Publications that are ephemeral in nature are housed in vertical file collections, the largest of which is located in Baker's Reference Department. We are not required to keep ephemeral materials for more than a few years.
Non-depository state publications are acquired from individual agencies. Some commercially-published works are acquired to complement the collection, for example Equity Publishing's Revised Statutes Annotated and other legal publications.
OTHER RESOURCES AVAILABLE
New Hampshire depository libraries are full depositories, so there are ordinarily few requests for documents not in the collection. Occasionally publications of a very specialized nature or those of limited interest to general or academic libraries are not made available through the depository system. If necessary, we can obtain the publication on interlibrary loan or direct the patron to the appropriate agency for information. The numbers in the Collecting Intensity statement reflect this apparent discrepancy; we get everything the State Library sends us, but that is not always everything that is published by state agencies. These agencies, and particularly the State Library, are also very helpful in supplying information from published and unpublished sources.
Creation Date
198?
Revision Date
February 1992 (Lois A. Krieger)June 1999 (Lois A. Krieger)
Bibliographer
John CocklinList of URLS
State of New Hampshire
[http://www.state.nh.us/]
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Last updated September 24, 1999 by: (z)