David Nord and John Richardson

 

[March 17, 2003 draft] for

 

A History of the Book in America:
Volume 5: The Enduring Book
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming)


 

 

U.S. Government Publishing in the Postwar Era

 

            During World War II, cellulose fiber was needed for the manufacture of both smokeless gunpowder and printing paper, and some government officials believed the latter was as vital as the former to winning the war.  As the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) put it in their official centennial history:  “Every war activity required printing to keep it going.”1  For the military, the GPO and its contractors printed millions of maps, manuals, forms, instruction sheets, labels, regulations, and orders — often overnight.  For the home front, the GPO produced myriad posters, flyers, and booklets, along with 73 billion ration stamps.  During the war, the federal government consumed 1.4 billion pounds of printing paper (27,000 railroad carloads), some 40 percent of total U.S. paper production.  If there was any doubt before the war, none existed by 1945:  The U.S. Government was the largest printer and publisher in the world.1

            In the century before World War II, the federal government had tried sporadically to make its print work more efficient and businesslike.  The U.S. Government Printing Office was established in 1860, and its authority over both legislative and executive printing was affirmed and extended by the New Printing Act of 1895, which codified federal printing laws and established the Office of the Superintendent of Documents within the GPO.2  In the early decades of the twentieth century, Congress worked to further centralize government printing in the GPO and to control the public distribution of government publications through the Superintendent of Documents.  But, ultimately, it was a hopeless cause.  The history of government printing and publishing in the twentieth century is a history of proliferation and fragmentation.  In the decades after the war, the U.S. Government was not only the world’s largest publisher; it was its most complex publisher.  In 1955 — long before the age of cheap desktop publishing and ubiquitous Internet Web sites — a special commission on federal government organization identified 327 departmental printing and duplicating plants, some 200 of which were operated by the military.  The commission estimated that less than 20 percent of expenditures on government printing were routed through the Government Printing Office.3

            This chapter tells the story of the spectacular growth and accompanying fragmentation of U.S. Government publishing in the postwar era.  It is partly a story of changing content.  The Cold War and the expansion of federal authority in the decades after 1945 turned government publishing efforts increasingly toward scientific, technical, and educational information.  It is also a story of changing media in government publishing, from paper to microform to CD-ROM to Internet.  And, finally, it is a story of changing methods of public dissemination, from depository library distribution and sales handled through the Superintendent of Documents to new clearinghouse institutions in other government agencies to a proliferation of federal Web sites by the turn of the 21st century.  Though these rapid and substantial changes in the world of government publishing in America made government information vastly more available, they also raised new problems of access and preservation.

 

* * * * *

 

            In the immediate postwar decades — and to some extent even into the twenty-first century — the U.S. Government Printing Office remained at the center of federal government publishing.  The GPO was a legislative-branch agency, overseen by a Congressional Joint Committee on Printing, whose roots went back to 1846.  Through most of its career, the GPO was first and foremost a large print shop.  For most of the postwar era, the chief work of the GPO was printing the Congressional Record, the Federal Register, and other routine publications of Congress and the executive branch.  By 1970, for example, the GPO was printing 50,000 copies of the Congressional Record, averaging between 200 and 300 pages per issue, every day Congress was in session.  Add to this output, the routine printing of bills, reports, patents, documents, and even postal cards and envelopes, and the GPO in its heyday was one of the major printing establishments in the country, with a full panoply of flatbed and rotary presses, both letterpress and offset, and the latest mechanical and computerized typesetting equipment.4

            But the Government Printing Office was much more than a job printer.  Throughout the postwar era, the GPO held supervisory authority over printing for all federal agencies other than the Supreme Court.  Furthermore, the Superintendent of Documents was the chief cataloguer and public distributor of U.S. Government publications.  This office operated a bookstore in Washington after 1921 and regional stores in several cities after 1967, though most of its sales were handled by mail order and through agents in other federal bureaus.  The Superintendent of Documents’ own publication, the Monthly Catalog of United States Government Publications, served as the central list and index of government publications from 1895 until the 1990s.5  Perhaps the most important institution for public access and long-term preservation of government documents was the GPO’s Federal Depository Library Program, which dated to the mid-nineteenth century.  This program was greatly expanded by the Depository Library Act of 1962, and in 2000 it was distributing documents to some 1,328 libraries, including fifty-three “regional” depository libraries.  The regional libraries (no more than two per state) were charged with preserving comprehensive collections of all titles that the GPO made available.6

            Such a tidy system of centralized printing, distribution, preservation, and bibliographical control — always more ideal than reality — unraveled in the postwar era.  To some extent, the monopoly status of the Government Printing Office was eroded by the rising influence — bureaucratic and constitutional — of the executive branch.  During the war, the military constantly groused about GPO oversight of its printing operations, and after the war the burgeoning Department of Defense, along with other new executive departments, continued to press for control of their own printing and publishing activities.  Most of this pressure was political and bureaucratic, but in 1983 the executive branch won an important constitutional claim of independence from Congressional oversight in the Chadha decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.  This decision limited Congress’s power to supervise executive activities through administrative entities such as the Joint Committee on Printing and the GPO.7  After 1983, the executive branch and Congress continued to joust over how government publishing could and should be controlled in the post-Chadha era.  By the late 1990s, the claim of Congress (through the Joint Committee on Printing) to supervisory authority over government printing and publishing had lost much of its constitutional force, though the organizational structure of the GPO, the Superintendent of Documents, and the Federal Depository Library Program remained intact.8

            These constitutional and bureaucratic challenges made it increasingly difficult for the Government Printing Office to acquire and distribute (much less print and publish) U.S. Government documents.  In 1996, the GPO estimated that about half of all government documents published that year were not indexed, catalogued, or distributed to the depository libraries.9  But the more important causes of the proliferation and fragmentation of government publishing were practical, not constitutional.  They involved dramatic changes in content, in media, and in modes of distribution.

 

* * * * *

 

            In the decades after World War II, the federal government steadily increased its support for scientific, technical, and educational research, and those efforts generated many thousands of publications, only some of which found their way to the Superintendent of Documents.  The most important clearinghouse for scientific and technical reports was the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), located in the Department of Commerce.  Initially called the Office of the Publication Board, the NTIS was launched by presidential order in 1945 and charged with collecting, declassifying, and disseminating World War II technical data to industry, government, and the public.  The NTIS gradually evolved into the chief distributor of information that grew from research sponsored by the Departments of Energy and Defense, NASA, and other executive agencies.  By the late 1990s, the NTIS maintained for sale a collection of more than three million scientific and technical reports, while adding 100,000 annually.10

            Though the NTIS emerged as perhaps the chief competitor to the GPO in the realm of government publishing, it was hardly the only one.  In the postwar era, another major disseminator of federal documents (and of many state government and private sector documents as well) was the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), established in 1966 and now located in the Department of Education, and which is being proposed for disestablishment.  Like NTIS, ERIC operated as a clearinghouse for an enormous variety of materials, and like the Superintendent of Documents, ERIC served as an indexer and bibliographer as well, with its Resources in Education and its Current Index to Journals in Education.  Overwhelmed by the flood of scientific, technical, and educational research reports associated with federal government activities, other departments and agencies also set up clearinghouse services, which became de facto publishers of government documents.  These included the Defense Technical Information Center, the National Library of Medicine, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information in the Department of Energy, and so on.11  In every case, the trend toward proliferation and fragmentation of the U.S. Government publishing enterprise was driven by the change in content of government publishing from the routine documents of governance (e.g., bills, proceedings, regulations,and official reports) to information generated by scientific and educational research.

            Changes in the media of publication in the decades after World War II also had a dramatic impact on federal government publishing.  From the beginning of the twentieth century, mimeograph and other cheap duplicating technologies had made quasi-publication ubiquitous in federal agencies and had guaranteed that many “fugitive” documents would never find their way to the Superintendent of Documents or the depository libraries.  The development of photocopy machines and small-scale offset printing in the 1960s and ‘70s and of computer desktop publishing in the 1980s further accelerated the centrifugal trend.  New paperless media technologies also had an enormous impact throughout the government, including within the Government Printing Office itself.  In 1977, the Superintendent of Documents began to distribute documents to depository libraries in microform, mainly fiche.  In the 1980s, the GPO turned to the production of CD-ROMs.  In the 1990s, the move was to the Internet.  These changes in the media of publication transformed the way the GPO did business.  They also diminished the centralized control of the GPO and the Joint Committee on Printing.  For example, the Bureau of the Census continued to channel its paper publications through the GPO and the Superintendent of Documents in the traditional way, while handling its own sales of diskettes, magnetic tapes, and CD-ROMs.12

            In the age of paper and microfilm, the Government Printing Office and the Superintendent of Documents continued to hold a key position in the realm of U.S. Government publication.  In the decade 1981-1991, more than half a million separate titles were distributed to the depository libraries, mainly in paper or microfiche.  By the early 1990s, the Superintendent of Documents was distributing about 110 million publication copies annually, around 30 million to libraries.  With the publication of the 1990 decennial census, the year 1992 was the peak of paper and microfiche distribution by the GPO, with 118.5 million publications distributed by the Superintendent of Documents.  As late as 1994, about 41 percent of the depository library copies were still in paper, 58 percent were still in microfiche, and only 1 percent were in electronic format, such as CD-ROM.  But 1992 turned out to be the high point for paper and fiche, and even CD-ROM copies fell off after 1997.  In the late 1990s, GPO distribution of government documents — including paper, microfiche, and CD-ROM — fell steadily to 12.7 million copies by 2000.13

            Lying behind the decline of “tangible” government publications was the Internet and, more specifically, the World Wide Web.  After 1993, the Internet revolutionized government publishing in several ways.  In the long historical perspective, the most important impact of the Internet may have been its power to blur the definition of “publication,” a definition that had shaped government policy since the New Printing Act of 1895.  According to Title 44 of the U.S. Code, “government publication” meant “information matter which is published as a an individual document at Government expense, or as required by law.”14  While the GPO had authority over “publications,” other government information lay outside its purview.  The Internet allowed — indeed, because of its low cost, encouraged — the “publication” of information that was not in the form of “an individual document.”  For example, even before the Internet, the dissemination of statistics in electronic form (computer tapes, disks, and CD-ROMs) had begun to shift publication away from the tangible, individual document and, consequently, away from the GPO.  The Internet sped up this transformation.  By the end of the twentieth century, the federal government had more than seventy agencies that each spent at least $500,000 annually on collecting and disseminating statistical data: statistics was the main business for eleven agencies.  All of these agencies — including major enterprises such as the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the National Center for Health Statistics — “published” most of their data on agency Web sites.15

             Though electronic distribution of information by individual bureaus and centers undermined the central publishing role of the Government Printing Office, it did not destroy it. Indeed, the GPO was an early adopter of Web technology for its own publishing and for its handling of other agencies’ materials.  In 1991, GPO officials predicted that within ten years the office would be “transformed from an environment dedicated to traditional print technologies to an integrated information-processing operation distinguished by the electronic creation, replication, and dissemination of information.”16  This prediction came true.  In 1994 the GPO began to distribute is major publications — Congressional Record, Federal Register, etc. — on its new Web site, GPO Access, which was mandated by the GPO Electronic Enhancement Act of 1993.  In the late 1990s, the Federal Depository Library Program became increasingly electronic and online, with 57 percent of FDLP titles available on GPO Access by 2000.  But perhaps even more significant, the GPO sought to retain its centralizing influence by making GPO Access a leading federal Internet archive and portal.17

            During the Clinton presidency (1993-2001), “e-government” became the watchword in Washington.  In 1993, a taskforce headed by Vice President Al Gore conducted a National Performance Review that laid out more than 300 initiatives designed to move the government away from paper and into the Internet age.  Most of these proposals concerned the government’s internal information structure and its interaction with individual citizens and organizations, but some initiatives encouraged the growth of Web publishing by government agencies.  With more than 22,000 Web sites delivering more than 35 million Web pages at the click of a mouse, the U.S. Government carried into the new century its long-held status as the largest and most complex publisher in the world.18

 

* * * * *

 

            The rise of the Internet and the sprawling system of agency-based Web publishing vastly expanded the availability of government information but also exacerbated problems of access to and preservation of government documents.  The Internet did not create these problems, however.  They had been growing throughout the postwar era, as government publishing accelerated and passed through several permutations of new media technology.

            Public access to government documents had always been a major problem, long before the digital age.  The Government Printing Office’s monopoly control over government printing, the Superintendent of Documents’ sales program and Monthly Catalog, and the Federal Depository Library Program were all designed in part to make scattered government information more available to the public.  But the GPO never saw a large proportion of government documents, and vast numbers of ephemeral publications never found their way into the Monthly Catalog or the depository libraries.19  Even documents that had come through the GPO were often hard to find and use.  The turn to microfiche in the 1970s made the problem of public access for ordinary people even worse than it had been in the age of paper. 

            In 1970 a private commercial venture, the Congressional Information Service (CIS), began indexing bills, committee prints, hearings, and other Congressional documents.  Later CIS launched the American Statistics Index and other services, including their own microfiche editions of documents and statistical tables.  In the Internet age, CIS (later a subsidiary of Lexis-Nexis, itself a division of Reed Elsevier) continued to offer excellent indexing and full-text access to government information through its online databases and search engines:  Congressional Universe, Statistical Universe, and Government Periodicals Universe.  CIS and other private indexing and retrieval services were technically sophisticated and increasingly user-friendly, but they were available only to subscribers at considerable cost.  Though the Internet greatly expanded the available stock of government information, practical use of that information often came at a price, via giant commercial indexers and vendors.20

            The e-government movement of the 1990s promoted efforts by government itself to make its expanding universe of Web information freely accessible and searchable.  FirstGov, a government-wide portal site with a powerful search engine, was launched in 2000, and by 2003 it could search more than 51 million federal Web pages.  FirstGov had enormous search power, but no archival capacity; it was only as good as the sites it searched.21  Thus, while free public access began to improve in the age of the Internet, preservation and permanence of documents remained a serious, even growing, concern.

             Like public access, preservation had always been a problem in the realm of government publication.  Fugitive documents that were never collected and catalogued by the Superintendent of Documents often disappeared forever.  Much government printing, even at the end of the twentieth century, was done on acidic paper that deteriorated over time.  Most of the microfiche used by the GPO in the 1970s was made with diazo film, which is not an archivally permanent photographic process.  Web publishing was even less archivally permanent, especially in its early years.  Information posted on Web sites was often altered or deleted; URLs were changed and pages relocated; and many entire Web sites disappeared entirely, as offices were revamped and projects discontinued.  In 2001 the General Accounting Office lamented that “there is no explicit legal requirement for the Superintendent of Documents or any other federal entity to permanently maintain online electronic versions of government documents.”22

            To deal with this problem, the Government Printing Office in 1999 organized the Permanent Public Access Working Group, a multi-agency effort to ensure the preservation of electronic information on the GPOAccess Web site.  By 2001 GPOAccess handled 2,200 databases on its own servers and had established partnerships with several other large federal information providers to assure that the content of their Web sites would be preserved and kept permanently available.  One feature of GPO Access was the Cybercemetery of Former Federal Web Sites,” which in 2003 included the entire Web sites of fourteen defunct offices and commissions.  Yet, despite these efforts, the permanence of most federal documents and records in the electronic era was far from guaranteed.  “The participants recognize that there are no government-wide procedures in place about permanent public access to Federal Government information products,” the Permanent Public Access Working Group declared in its 2001 report.23

            Of course, much federal information has never been accessible because the government has classified it as secret.  In the postwar era — an era of perpetual international intrigue and burgeoning executive power — a “culture of secrecy” pervaded the Government of the United States.  With the coming of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966, many of the secret recesses of executive branch government were pried open, usually in spite of considerable foot-dragging by presidents and bureaucrats.  By the 1990s, there seemed to be a bit of a trend toward more openness in government, though as late as 2001 one historian estimated that if all the documents still classified as secret were stacked up, they would make a pile three times the height of the Washington Monument.24  If the trend in the 1990s was toward somewhat greater openness in government, the new age of terrorism after September 11, 2001, may have reversed that trend.  New executive policies and new legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 give federal agencies more authority to remove sensitive information from Web sites in the name of homeland security.  In one widely reported case, the government ordered depository libraries to destroy a CD-ROM that contained information on public water supplies.25  It seems certain that government policies, more than the technological characteristics of the media, will shape both access and permanency of government information in the twenty-first century.

           

* * * * *

 

            In the midst of World War II, Congress passed the Federal Reports Act of 1942, the purpose of which was to stem the rising tide of paperwork required of citizens and to streamline the flow of information in government.  Throughout the postwar era, the federal government sought ways to cope with the deluge of paper and print, including the adoption of a series of acts with the phrase “paperwork reduction” in their titles.  In a bold embrace of the new electronic technologies of the 1990s, Congress titled a 1998 revision of the paperwork reduction legislation the “Government Paperwork Elimination Act.”26 

            But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as in World War II, paper was still a strategic resource.  Electronic publishing had indeed eliminated paper for many forms of government information, and various e-government projects had finally begun to reduce the paperwork required of citizens and other clients of government.  Yet, for some purposes paper and print still reigned supreme.  In 1996, the Superintendent of Documents identified a list of forty-two “Essential Titles for Public Use in Paper Format,” including a wide variety of federal codes, handbooks, serials, and statistical reports.  Most of these publications were also available online, but the Superintendent of Documents concluded that only publication on paper could guarantee that they would be accessible in perpetuity.  Even in an electronic age, some government documents must remain ink-on-paper simply because they are “essential to the conduct of government.”27

 

 

Notes

 

            1. Government Printing Office, 100 GPO Years:  1861-1961 (Washington:  U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), 132-40.

            2. Robert E. Kling, Jr., The Government Printing Office (New York:  Praeger, 1970), chap. 2.  The statutory basis for federal printing and publishing is codified in Title 44 of the United States Code.

            3. Kling, Government Printing Office, 46; 100 GPO Years, 151.

            4. Kling, Government Printing Office, chaps. 4-5.

            5. Peter Hernon and Harold C. Relyea, “Government Publishing:  Past to Present,” Government Information Quarterly, 12 (1995), 315-18; Stephen W. Stathis, “The Evolution of Government Printing and Publishing in America,” Government Publications Review, 7A (1980), 377-390.

            6. Peter Hernon, Harold C. Relyea, Robert E. Dugan, and Joan F. Cheverie, United States Government Information:  Policies and Sources (Westport, Conn.:  Libraries Unlimited, 2002), chap. 15.  See also “Symposium on Federal Depository Libraries:  Challenges and Opportunities for the 21st Century,” Government Information Quarterly, 15 (1998), 11-85; and “A Symposium on Depository Library Partnerships at the Turn of the Millennium,” Government Information Quarterly, 17 (2000), 271-348.

            7. INS v. Chadha, 462 US 919 (1983).

            8. Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 73-78.

            9. General Accounting Office, Information Management:  Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, GAO-01-428 (Washington, D.C.:  GAO, March 2001), 5.

            10. John V. Richardson, “The United States Government as Publisher Since the Roosevelt Administration,” Library Research, 4 (1982), 224-27; Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 132-33; General Accounting Office, Information Management:  Dissemination of Technical Reports, GAO-01-490 (Washington, D.C.:  GAO, May 2001), 3. See also National Technical Information Service Web site (http://www.ntis.gov).

            11. Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 31, 134; GAO, Information Management:  Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, 5-6.  See also Kurt N. Molholm, “The Defense Technical Information Center:  Expanding Its Horizons,” Government Information Quarterly, 12 (1995), 331-44; Bernard M. Fry and Eva L. Kiewitt, “The Educational Resources Information Center:  Its Legal Basis, Organization, Distribution System, Bibliographic Controls,” Drexel Library Quarterly, 10 (1982), 63-78; and Educational Resources Information Center Web site (http://www.eric.ed.gov).

            12. Hernon and Relyea, “Government Publishing,” 318-19; Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 346; Donald O. Case and Kathleen Welden, “Distribution of Government Publications to Depository Libraries by Optical Disk,” Government Publications Review, 13 (1986), 313-322.

            13. Government Printing Office, 1994 Annual Report (Washington, D.C.:  GPO, 1994), 30-32; Hernon and Relyea, “Government Publishing,” 318; GAO, Information Management:  Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, 52-53.

            14. 44 USC 1901.  For an overview of U.S. Government Web sites see Peter Hernon, Robert E. Dugan, and John A. Shuler, U.S. Government on the Web:  Getting the Information You Need (2nd ed.; Englewood, Colo.:  Libraries Unlimited, 2001).

            15. Hernon et al., United States Government Information, chap. 13.  See also Joseph W. Duncan and William C. Shelton, Revolution in the United States Government Statistics, 1926-1976 (Washington, D.C.:  GPO, 1978).

            16. Government Printing Office, GPO/2001:  Visions for a New Millennium (Washington, D.C.:  GPO, 1991), i-ii.

            17. GPO, 1994 Annual Report, 25; GAO, Information Management:  Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, 6-7; Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 78-79.

            18. Office of the Vice President, From Red Tape to Results:  Creating a Government That Works Better & Costs Less, Report of the National Performance Review (Washington, D.C.:  GPO, 1993); Office of the Vice President, Access America:  Reengineering Through Information Technology, Report of the National Performance Review and the Government Information Technology Services Board (Washington, D.C.:  GPO, 1997); Office of Management and Budget, E-Government Strategy:  Simplified Delivery of Services to Citizens (Washington, D.C.:  OMB, February 2002).

            19.  GAO, Information Management:  Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, 5.

            20. Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 30-31, 36-37.

            21. Ibid., 33-34, 38.  See also FirstGov Web site (http://www.firstgov.gov).

            22. GAO, Information Management:  Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, 10; National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, A Comprehensive Assessment of Public Information Dissemination (Washington, D.C.:  NCLIS, January 2001), 2-3.

            23. Permanent Public Access Working Group, A Report on Meetings Hosted by the U.S. Government Printing Office, 1999-2000 (Washington, D.C.:  GPO, 2001); Government Printing Office, Biennial Report to Congress on the Status of GPO Access (Washington, D.C.:  GPO, December 2001).  See also Permanent Public Access Working Group Web site (http://www.gpo.gov/ppa/); and “Cybercemetary of Former Federal Web Sites” (http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/cybercemetary.html).  Another federal agency concerned with the preservation of online documents is the Library of Congress.  See its Web site THOMAS (http://www.thomas.loc.gov).

            24. Athan G. Theoharis, “Introduction,” in A Culture of Secrecy:  The Government Versus the People’s Right to Know, ed. by Athan G. Theoharis (Lawrence:  University Press of Kansas, 1998), 4; Philip H. Melanson, Secrecy Wars:  National Security, Privacy, and the Public’s Right to Know (Washington, D.C.:  Brassey’s, 2001), 2.

            25. Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 389; “An Order to Destroy a CD-ROM Raises Concerns Among University Librarians,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 8, 2002, A34.

            26. Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 170-78.

            27. GAO, Information Management:  Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, 7, 64-65.