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Government Information Locator Service (GILS): About
The Government Information Locator Service (GILS) was created in 1994 to provide a mechanism for users to identify, locate, and describe publicly available Federal information resources, including electronic information resources. GILS records identify public information resources within the Federal Government, describe the information available in these resources, and assist in obtaining the information.
In the years since GILS was issued, however, advances in technology have made the standard obsolete that enable agencies to avoid the ongoing, resource intensive cataloging efforts mandated by the GILS. As a result of fr02se08N, the GILS application on GPO Access is no longer being updated and an archive is available. The archive database spans from December 7, 1994 through September 2, 2008.
Because this collection was decentralized, the GPO Access GILS site was only one of several US Federal GILS sites. Thirty-two agencies mounted their GILS records on GPO Access. The GILS records of the other departments and agencies are spread across many sites. For basic information about GILS, visit www.gils.net.
For agencies that mounted their GILS records on a server other than GPO Access, GPO wrote GILS pointer records, to describe their GILS holdings and link to those holdings. GPO sent those pointer records to each agency and invited each to edit its own records as appropriate.
The Government Printing Office partially funded a study entitled, "An Evaluation of the Federal Government's Implementation of the Government Information Locator Service: The Final Report", which is available on GPO Access. This study was completed on June 30, 1997.
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