Federal Online Documents Access Disrupted

For many years we have listed tens of thousands of United States government documents in our online catalog of holdings together with URLs to their online equivalents hosted by agencies of the federal government. These URLs have been provided to libraries nationwide by the GPO (Government Printing Office).

On August 24th the GPO server providing these URLs suffered a catastrophic failure. GPO attempts to restore service have thus far been ineffective. As of Tuesday 9/1 only 6,000 out of 116,000 URLs had been restored. On Wednesday 9/2 the GPO server went completely offline.

This is a nationwide problem. Users of the Temple University online catalog who seek to access online U.S. government publications they find through the catalog should look at the full catalog record and use the second alternate URL if one is provided in the catalog record. The purl.access.gpo.gov link will not work until further notice. We will continue to monitor the situation and will announce restoration of PURL services by GPO.

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