Power to the People

The U.S. Government Printing Office churns out five to six hundred documents per day: estimated total for 1976, 150,000. At the University of Iowa’s main library—one of several official GPO depositories nationwide—it takes one full-time employee just to open and sort the 14 boxes of government material that arrive each day, another nine employees to catalogue and shelve it. Once everything is labeled, stacked, and shelved, none of the government indexes works well enough for a non-librarian to find anything that might interest him. There may not, of course, be much interest anyway, what with such exemplary GPO documents to choose from as the recent Occupational Safety and Health Administration booklet Safety with Beef Cattle, which offers dairy farmers hints like, “Don’t fall.” And, “Hazards are one of the main causes of accidents.” Information of this caliber makes every GPO depository in the country a veritable mother lode of ennui.

It would seem obvious that the distribution of information is not the Federal Government’s forte. Jefferson may have had this in mind when he said, “Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.”

JB

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John Bowie

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The U.S. Government Printing Office churns out five to six hundred documents per day: estimated total for 1976, 150,000. At the University of Iowa’s main library—one of several official GPO depositories nationwide—it takes one full-time employee just to open and sort the 14 boxes of government material that arrive each day, another nine employees to catalogue and shelve it. Once everything is labeled, stacked, and shelved, none of the government indexes works well enough for a non-librarian to find anything that might interest him. There may not, of course, be much interest anyway, what with such exemplary GPO documents to choose from as the recent Occupational Safety and Health Administration booklet Safety with Beef Cattle, which offers dairy farmers hints like, “Don’t fall.” And, “Hazards are one of the main causes of accidents.” Information of this caliber makes every GPO depository in the country a veritable mother lode of ennui.

It would seem obvious that the distribution of information is not the Federal Government’s forte. Jefferson may have had this in mind when he said, “Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.”