The Shared Print Partnership (SPP) is excited to announce that the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) has become the SPP’s newest member as of September 2026, along with the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). The GPO, created by the United States Congress in 1860, is responsible for publishing Federal Government information products, including everything from the Congressional record to departmental technical and reports, while the FDLP, part of the GPO since 1895, manages the dissemination of Federal Government content online and to libraries nationwide. This makes the GPO/FDLP in many ways the original shared print program in the United States. They bring a long term, and national level perspective to the shared print conversations and collaborations among the SPP’s current members from across North America.
The mission of the GPO is to publish trusted information for the Federal Government to the American People, and the agency vision is America informed. The history of the GPO goes back to the Civil War. While there was a tradition of printing congressional and other government documents since Benjamin Franklin’s era, pressures to regulate both standards and expenses for government publications led to congress establishing the GPO in 1860. The GPO has occupied the corner of North Capitol and H Streets in Washington, DC, blocks from the U.S. Capitol, since March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln’s first year as president.
A need to ensure that these documents were disseminated in a way that made them widely accessible to the American public led to the creation of the FDLP in 1895. A core component of the FDLP is the National Collection of U.S. Government Public Information, which is as “all public information products of the U.S. Government, regardless of format or medium, produced by Federal employees or paid for with Federal funds.” The tangible national collection is distributed across a network of over 1,000 Federal depository libraries. .
The rise of digitization and modern technologies means that today the GPO and FDLP are tackling new challenges to ensure that they fulfill the FDLP mission to “provide free, ready, and permanent public access to Federal Government information, now and for future generations.” This means balancing the technologies that can provide immediate access today with putting shared print standards in place for the preservation of physical copies. These physical copies ensure continued access to materials now and fulfill the FDLP’s commitment to “permanent public access” in case of any future loss of digital information.
Abby McDermott, Collection Management Librarian at the GPO, will be the official SPP contact. She has been an advocate for shared print for multiple years now, including delivering a presentation at the 2024 PAN forum on the GPO’s Preservation Steward partnerships, which supports preservation of print Federal Government publications held in library collections. McDermott says that “collaboration is essential” to support the National Collection, and looks forward to the opportunity to both share what the GPO has learned across its long history and learn from the current practices of fellow shared print consortia.
The SPP Executive Committee (EC) expressed great enthusiasm in welcoming the GPO and FDLP into the SPP. SPP EC chair, Tony Fonseca noted that current SPP members have done substantial work on shared print best practices for monographs and serials, but that the GPO’s membership opens up an interesting new conversation about the best ways for libraries to handle government documents and publications. Mark Paris, SPP EC chair elect, said that “this is exactly the right new member at exactly the right time.”
For more information, contact Laura Aydelotte, laydelotte@clir.org