In practice, the FDLP has evolved to perform four broad functions:

• Deposit. The functions that relate to selection, acquisition, distribution, and physical control of publications (classification, etc.) by GPO, including the retention of ownership of deposited publications by the Government, and inspection to assure compliance;
• Assurance of current and permanent public access, including the requirements made of depository libraries for free access to the general public, retention schedules, and service to users of Government information;
• Provision of locator tools, including the statutorily mandated catalogs and indexes GPO produces as well as bibliographic description and other types of finding aids;
• Promotion and facilitation of use, including training opportunities, conferences, and marketing.

It is in the first two categories, deposit and assurance of access, that the transition to a more electronically-based program has had the most fundamental effect. In the print world the system of deposit provides a stable and secure environment in which information is, as a by-product of the legal requirement that Government printing be either performed or contracted for by GPO, funneled into a geographically distributed and fairly closely regulated system of outlets. In return for receiving the information free-of-charge, these libraries agree to be bound by various requirements for access. In the Internet environment, Federal agencies no longer have an imperative to involve GPO in the dissemination of their information, and the need for redundant housing of copies of publications to achieve geographical equity is obviated by the ability to use a single source from multiple remote locations. At the same time, needs and expectations on the part of librarians and library users for access to this information have grown.

From	To
Focus on products	Focus on services
Dissemination	Access
Shipping physical products	Electronic connections
Physical, tangible information formats	Online Internet access
Short-term GPO responsibilities	GPO responsible for long-term access

The FDLP has among its fundamental assumptions that information included is official Government information, and that it will, by virtue of its being included in the program, be freely available to the public, permanently. Two of the most significant challenges in charting a digital future for the program have been to create an operational structure around the basic policy framework of assuring the official integrity of the information and to keep that information available and accessible permanently.

Any discussion of the integrity of digital publications ultimately leads to some discussion of authentication, which, at a purely technical level, has to do with ensuring that the digital bitstream received by the user is identical to that which left the server. This is accomplished most often by a sampling of the bitstream. In the commercial realm, the term is used in terms of assuring that a document for which a user has paid for access is in fact "authentic," or what was paid for. At a more abstract level, authentication relates to the genuineness of the object, the authenticity of the content. This can mean an assurance that the object is what it purports to be and actually emanates from whence it claims to be from. It may also be an assurance that the object is verifiable or certified as "official," that is, having not only genuineness of origin, but possessing some official sanction thereof.

Both of these examples point to a construction of trust, and a source of verification separate from but related to the object itself. Determining or establishing authenticity is a comparative process, and is the result of various tests or judgements.

In their report "Preserving Digital Information," the Task Force on Archiving Digital Information of the Research Libraries Group defines five criteria or attributes on which the integrity of digital objects rests:

Three of these attributes are of particular concern in the context of the FDLP Electronic Collection: content and what comprises it; fixity, and provenance.

In the print world a publication from a government agency, printed by GPO, passed through a series of official channels that assured the integrity of the content, including a variety of internal controls and approvals within the originating agency, and proofreading at GPO ("verification by proof.") The requisition for printing services and the actual publication of a document in a sense legitimized or authorized the content, fixed it in time, and established a chain of responsibility. So for example, one could be confident that a copy of the Statistical Abstract of the United States received in a shipment box in a depository library was in every respect consistent with copy that was approved and ordered to be printed by U.S. Census Bureau officials.

In the environment of the World Wide Web, government processes and structures for such verification are being altered and reduced, and various aspects of this scenario are altered. The publication is not securely fixed in time by the printing process. Web publishing in Government agencies often has departed from the bureaucratic structures for review and approval that grew up around print. In this dynamic and less certain environment, users still expect some mechanism to establish the same level of trust. It is generally recognized that this role may be filled by some variant of the notion of the "trusted third party;" ultimately, authenticity and integrity of digital objects are matters of trust. Our very definitions and descriptions of authenticity and "officialness" revolve around independent verification or comparison that provide a basis for trust. It is the role, then, of GPO’s electronic collection to act in the capacity of "trusted third party," providing the assurance, based on some verifiable criteria, that the information is indeed official. With printed documents, this authenticity was straightforward to establish, and formed the basis of the authority of the FDLP. In the digital world the FDLP must establish this authority and then build the remaining attributes of free and permanent access on that foundation.

The initial approach to this question, which may eventually prove to be only an interim solution, has been to structure access through the FDLP such that users gain access to publications, using GPO’s bibliographic tools, from the originating agency or Web site, not from a central repository or mirror site. Cataloging practices and other description have employed Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs), which assist in managing volatile resource locations and thus simplifying access for end users. By consistently directing users to the originating site, within a limited universe of domains (primarily .gov, .mil, and .fed.us), the official character of the publication is assured.

The obvious difficulty for this strategy is the assumption that while some publications will remain in their originating locations permanently, some, if not most, do not. For this reason, a significant commitment of FDLP resources is being devoted to building, through various avenues, a working archive of the publications in the program. Various experiences have led to the conclusion that a single, central archive of electronic publications would be not only extremely difficult to create and maintain, but would be unwieldy to manage and keep viable. Thus a suite of solutions is being tested, including:

• an in-house archive, operated on GPO servers by GPO personnel;
• agreements with agencies for keeping information permanently available on native servers in agencies;
• agreements with partners within the FDLP such as university libraries and consortia to manage portions of the archive remotely;
• agreements with vendors or service providers for fee-for-service arrangements to store and provide access to publications.

The strategy to achieve seamless ongoing access distributes responsibility among FDLP stakeholders. Where possible, GPO obtains a documented commitment from publishing agencies that electronic publications will be available on the originating site permanently, and that GPO is given the files to manage in the event that the agency cannot honor that commitment. Where a documented agreement is not possible, GPO downloads a copy of the publication to its own archive or seeks a partner to manage the archived publications. These publications are retained, updated as needed, and provided to the user upon verification that the information is no longer attainable from the originating site. The PURL is redirected to the archived copy and the user is alerted that the publication is an archived version.

In terms of assuring permanent access, technology has radically altered the deposit model: where previously permanence was assured by multiple depositories being bound to retain publications in perpetuity, and GPO’s responsibility as custodian was largely complete at the point that publications were shipped to depository libraries, GPO must now assume responsibility for keeping the single electronic source not only currently available, but technologically viable. Based on the model of print-based publishing, GPO has no control over content of publications, nor of the format in which information is presented. Although there have been calls for standardization of electronic Government information formats, no standards exist, no consensus has evolved, and no entity exists with the authority to promulgate or enforce a fully Government-wide standard.

Presentation of electronic publications that rely on an open standard, such as HTML (for text) or TIFF (for images) will presumably remain straightforward as the Web and its successor technologies develop. Publications, however, that rely on a proprietary format or commercial software for their use pose serious challenges, since backward compatibility in newer technology will depend on market forces and demand. GPO cannot consider content separate from access and access mechanisms; thus the greatest challenge over the coming years will be to keep publications captured in 2000 viable despite the advance of technology. Transfer of all publications in the archive to a single, migration-friendly, open standard format has not, in the interest of preserving the official nature of the publications, been pursued thus far. Such transfer may, however, present itself as the best alternative for keeping archived publications alive. Likewise advances in electronic archiving may conceivably separate format from storage and re-presentation and thus ease the dilemma.

Three factors have worked in concert to move GPO’s transition forward since its inception in the mid-90’s: the overall trend in Government to adopt electronic media for communicating with the public; the rapid adoption of electronic media in libraries generally; and the clear direction of the Congress to implement greater electronic access and to seek reductions in the cost of disseminating information. The third factor has been the most direct and imperative. The transition process has been guided by the underlying assumption that as the emphasis on tangible product distribution diminishes, GPO’s resources will be redirected toward managing electronic files, coordinating the cooperative efforts that will facilitate preservation of electronic publications, and maintaining a standard of permanence, authenticity, and reliability comparable to the print-based program. While the specifics of implementing these assumptions are developing by degrees, the driving forces have remained clear: that free public information is a right of the people, that Government has an obligation to provide broad, ongoing public access to that information, and that the FDLP continues to be uniquely placed to assure that access.