Government Databases, Documents and Web Sites in Health and Medicine

Abstract

Within the last few years, the United States government has initiated a major effort to make government publications available in electronic format. Although there are still print materials produced, the trend for publicly available materials or those designed for mass distribution has been to make electronic copies available for printing or downloading. In some cases, the electronic version is the only version, leading to some concerns about future access to electronic-only materials and the archiving of such documents. In fact, there now exists the possibility that documents may be easily and permanently removed from public access, because of the electronic-version only policy. However, the trend towards having electronic-only versions will likely continue.