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 Rise of Digital Information

Throughout most of its history GPO guaranteed public access to government information through printing. Even today we continue to print the majority of our most important documents. But in just the past few years, there have been revolutionary changes in the way the public accesses and uses government information.

New and continuously evolving strategies of communications now are not only possible but have become mainstream practices, changing how America is kept informed. This has put GPO at the very epicenter of change in the ways people create and use information to communicate, remain informed, research a topic, and preserve a record.

Today, for a large and growing share of government documents, there is no longer a requirement for type-setting, printing, or binding, and there is no tangible document to make its way to library shelves or otherwise be preserved for the future. A document author begins the process by digitally recording a manuscript on a personal computer. By making this document available through a Web portal there often is no need for an original printing of multiple copies.

Such documents are said to be "born digital and published to the Web." So pervasive and common has this publishing strategy become that we estimate that as many as 50 percent of all federal government documents are now born digital, published to the Web, and will never be printed by GPO.

Transforming GPO

This trend was well established when I took office, and therein lay the challenge for GPO. What the White House asked me to do was move GPO out of a nineteenth-century-based printing mentality and into the twenty-first-century digital world. Throughout my life I have used technology to enhance the ability to get information into the hands of people, and this was a task I was up to taking on.

Transforming GPO to a modern digital platform would involve a number of fundamental changes, however. While GPO's mission would remain essentially the same, the introduction of digital technology would change the ways our products and services would be created. It would change how they would look and function to meet the changing needs of the federal government and the public. And it would change the very culture and outlook of an agency grounded in an earlier era.

The digital age itself presents its own unique set of issues and concerns, and carrying out GPO's transformation would require us to develop solutions to the problems that digital information presents. For example:

* Printed books can last hundreds of years, but how do we ensure that digital information will be easily accessible even five years from now?

* With so many publishing solutions now available, how do we create a common set of standards for digital documents?

* What's the best way to ensure the security of digital information?

* How do we deal with the multiple versions of official documents in a digital environment? How do we determine which version deserves to be preserved for the future?