Keeping America Informed: The U.S. Government Printing Office. 150 Years of Service to the Nation.

摘要

The U.S. Government Printing Office published its last official history 50 years ago, marking its centennial anniversary. 100 GPO Years 18611961 has proven to be a remarkably valuable resource and deserves to stand alone as an enduring contribution to the historical record of this great agency. Instead of trying to improve on it, with the approach of our 150th anniversary we decided to recreate the telling of GPOs story. Keeping America Informed: The U.S. Government Printing Office: 150 Years of Service to the Nation recasts our history in a fresh light, with new contributions and emphases, and provides the reader with a greater exposure to GPOs rich photographic record, with many of the images in this book published for the first time. Most important of all, Keeping America Informed describes how the agency has transformed itself through the years by continually adapting to the most efficient technologies available to get its work done. In the ink-on-paper era, this meant moving from handset to machine-set type, from slower to high-speed presses, and from hand to automated bookbinding. These changes enabled GPO to keep up with the demands of a growing Nation and helped keep costs down, and they were significant for their time. Yet they pale by comparison with the transformation that accompanied GPOs incorporation of electronic information technologies, the single most dominant trend at the agency of the past 50 years, and the generator of unprecedented improvements in productivity and hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer savings that continue into the present. Today, GPO is fundamentally different from what it was as recently as a generation ago: smaller, leaner, and equipped with digital production capabilities that are the bedrock of the information systems relied upon daily by Congress, Federal agencies, and the public to ensure open and transparent Government in the digital era. Keeping America Informed is a portrait of the generations of men and women who have worked here as compositors, proofreaders, platemakers, press operators, bookbinders, printing plant workers, librarians, engineering and maintenance staff, accountants, information technology technicians, personnel specialists, police officers, and all the other functions required by GPO. Few Federal agencies can count as their heritage the scope of the work GPO has performed, ranging from the first printing of the Emancipation Proclamation to providing digital access to the Governments publications today. The men and women of GPO are responsible for that heritage. Keeping America Informed is a new telling of their story and their enduring achievements.