Article: Confronting Digital Age Head-On

This article is about how the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) is changing, now that many documents are published electronically. The GPO recognizes that people who are using government documents want them electronically and for free.

The Future Digital System will respond to that trend by making available online all 2.2 million government documents -- a total of 60 million pages -- by the end of the 2007, tagged by keywords so they can be easily searched. It is a nearly $30 million endeavor and will include documents all the way back to the nation's founding.

The secure and intelligent documents unit is working to ensure that digital documents are certified as authentic and that important documents are extremely difficult to counterfeit, something that has posed more of a problem as technologies have emerged to assist counterfeiters.

We do think about the need to not have electronic documents altered. With government documents (including passports), the idea that there could be counterfeit versions raises the stakes. It will be interesting to see whose technology they implement to help manage these documents and insure their authenticity.

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Technorati tag: Digitization