U.S. Government Information
Government Printing Office (GPO)
Established by Congress in 1860 to handle the publication of all legislative branch information, the Government Printing Office (GPO) today exists to "acquire, print, and distribute" government information. While the GPO is an agency of the legislative branch, it now performs these duties for all three branches of the Federal government. Among its earlier responsibilities, the GPO produced the Congressional Record , an official journal of the activities of Congress. The GPO still produces this publication on a daily basis when Congress is in session, but its reponsibilities have broadened considerably, encompassing such entities as the nationwide system of the Federal Depository Library Program and maintaining a powerful presence on the web with their GPO Access website, a major portal of government information. While the head of the GPO is the Public Printer of the United States, a position appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate, the agency is overseen by the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing. (4)
Federal Depository Library Program. A succession of legislative acts in the mid to late 1800s gave rise to a network of libraries acting as depositories for government information. Today, under the direction of GPO, the Federal Depository Library Depository Program (FDLP) contains over 1200 participating libraries, encompassing academic and public sectors. Of these libraries, approximately 50 have been designated as "regional" libraries while the others have assumed the status of "selective" libraries. Regional libraries hold complete collections of all publications made available by GPO, while the selective libraries choose their government collections based on selection considerations often employed in other sectors of librarianship (e.g. audience and space limitations). Different retention obligations also exist for the two types of libraries, as regionals must retain all information products in its holding (unless a specific document is superceded by another), while selectives have less restrictive retention obligations. (4) Items found in the government collections of depository libraries are, in many cases, organized by a unique classification system known as SuDocs, and unless one is familiar with this scheme, he will most likely need the help of a government documents librarian to help him find a specific item. With the exceptions of American Samoa and the Federated States of Micronesia with only one, each state and US territory or commonwealth has at least several libraries participating in the program, and one should easily be able to locate an FDLP library relatively close to home.
GPO Access. Funded by the Federal Depository Library Program, GPO Access is one of the largest portals of online government information products today. Providing "free access to more than 1500 databases" (3), one may easily search this site for such things as the full text of congressional bills presented from 1993 forward, presidential communications to congress, treaty documents, biographies and voting histories of congressmen, the text of the current national budget as well as past budgets since 1997, indexes for publications of the various executive branch agencies...the list is almost endless , and anyone researching the current political, economic, legal and diplomatic arenas of the United States will want to take advantage of this site to its fullest. It is entirely free and there is no registration procedure involved.
