“The U.S. Government Printing Office published its last official history 50 years ago, marking its centennial anniversary.
100 GPO Years 1861–1961 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 GPO’s 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 GPO’s 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 GPO’s 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.”