Congress as publisher: Three perspectives

The Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C. (GPO), celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2011. Created by Congress in 1860 and beginning business on the day Lincoln was inaugurated, March 4, 1861, GPO has served as the Federal Government's centralized resource for producing, procuring, cataloging, indexing, authenticating, disseminating, and preserving the official information of the U.S. Government in a variety of formats. Strictly speaking, however, GPO has never been a publisher in the same sense that a newspaper or book publisher takes responsibility for the intellectual content of their publications. Over its history, GPO has provided a vast range of services related to the printing and publishing process, but the ultimate responsibility for the products has rested with the Government generally and Congress specifically. [Copyright Elsevier Inc.]