A printer makes his mark: GPO has been transformed, thanks to the indelible leadership of Bruce James

Public Manager, The, Spring, 2007 by Carl A. Fillichio

The importance of access to government information has been widely commented upon in legal, economic, academic, and other circles. As Americans, we need ready access to government information to make informed, responsible choices about ourselves and our future. The First Amendment to our Constitution includes a specific freedom of information--freedom of the press--which comprehends a more expansive freedom: a right to know, a right to have access to information, including government information. We have a long cultural and social heritage of public access to government information that is synonymous with that concept, and which continues to prevail today.

Access to government information is also essential in our Nation with its highly developed technological and industrial capacity, and where the links between that capacity and the government are strong. Government information is a tool and a commodity: it has economic value, especially consumer information and information reporting new technological developments both at home and abroad. Government information on the Nation's economy has wide-ranging effects on Wall Street and in international markets.

Equally as important, government regulation of business, lawmaking, and statistical compilation have created vast information-gathering industries to service highly diversified and growing client groups. In the international arena, the free exchange of government information, except that classified for security reasons, is indispensable to diplomacy and commerce.

And in the academic environment, government information is a primary research source that continues to grow in importance. This importance is not limited to the social science field, but extends to the physical sciences, the humanities, and even the arts. No one will dispute the fact that government information is crucial to informed public decision making and the achievement of our national goals.

So important is public access to government information in our country that as early as 1813 Congress passed an act to provide for the distribution of congressional and other government documents on a regular basis to libraries and other institutions in each state for the free use of the public.

This legislation was the antecedent of GPO's Federal Depository Library Program, under which today we distribute the broadest possible spectrum of government publications in print and online formats to some 1,200 public, academic, law, and other libraries located in virtually every congressional district across the Nation, to be used by millions of Americans free of charge every year.

There are two such libraries here in Rochester, one the Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester, which as been a federal depository library since 1880, and the other the Rochester Public Library, part of the Monroe County Library System, whose depository status dates to 1963.

Along with the depository program, GPO today also provides public access to the wealth of official federal information through public sales, through various statutory and reimbursable distribution programs, and--most prominently--by posting more than 300,000 federal titles online on GPO Access (www.gpo.gov/gpoaccess), our current Web site.