GPO pilot puts historical Treasury records online
The Government Printing Office is expanding its online offerings with a pilot program to make historical Treasury Department documents available in a digital format for the first time.
GPO is making a half-century of foreign currency exchange rates available on its Federal Digital System. FDsys will provide a permanent home for the documents with digital archiving and public access.
The site already hosts a wealth of government information generated since the printing office established its GPO Access Web site in the 1990s, and most material produced by agencies now is available online, either through FDsys or on agency websites, said GPO Chief Technology Officer Ric Davis.
“We are in an environment where about 97 percent of government documents are born digital,” Davis said, and the Internet is their natural environment. “What we are doing now is looking at historical information that is being digitized for the first time.”
With development of FDsys, GPO has a full content management system and is moving beyond printing and publishing to cataloging, indexing and authenticating documents online. Documents available on FDsys are authenticated with digital signatures to assure that content has not been altered.
Treasury began the effort to digitize older collections several years ago, said a Treasury official. The department maintains a federal depository library whose records are available to the public, but older documents are available only in hard copy to those to visit the library. Treasury officials then planned to make them available online.