Robert C. Tapella

Public Printer of the United Sates (since 2007)

(Government Printing Office)

Why He Matters

While at the Government Printing Office (GPO), Tapella has made an effort to transform the agency into one of the largest factories of digital information in the world.

In 2007, Tapella authenticated the federal budget through a digital signature for the first time and a year later created the Federal Digital System (FDsys). FDsys provides the public with a place to go for digital documents from all three branches of government. Tapella has called FDsys "a world-class information management system."

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Corrections?

Background

At a Glance

Career History: Government Printing Office Chief of Staff (2004 to 2007); GPO Deputy Chief of Staff (2002 to 2004)
Hometown: California
Alma Mater: California Polytechnic State University, 1991

Office: 732 North Capitol St., NW, Washington, DC 20401; Phone: 202-512-1800
Web site

Path to Power

Tapella has a long history in design and print. At the age of 12, he learned calligraphy, illumination and bookbinding. Two years later, he became a freelance designer with The New Scribes, an organization in San Jose, Calif.

For college, Tapella took his experience in design to California Polytechnic State University. After graduating in 1991, Tapella built his own design business that included work in print brokering, direct mail, corporate communications and strategic planning.

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The Issues

The GPO has existed as the primary dissemenator of government documents since 1895, and Tappella says its challenges are "not much different than the disarray in the cataloging, distribution and storage of electronic documents we all face today. There is a solution for this electronic disarray - and we call it: e-lifecycle management."

In order to tackle the problems of authenticating and preserving public documents in the digital world, the GPO replaced its former archiving system, GPO Access,with FDsys, in 2009.

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Tappella said in July 2009 that he believes GPO should be the premier source of digital government information and support President Obama's "vision for transparency and open government."

FDsys

FDsys authenticates, preserves and provides permanent public access to government information, which is retrieved both manually and semi-electronically from legislative and federal web sites (the GPO is working to include judicial documents). The goal is to have a complete historical record of all federal government documents since the founding of the U.S.

FDsys already contains close to 200,000 digital government documents, and the GPO is moving forward with plans to include such titles as the Federal Register, the Congressional Record and the daily compilation of presidential documents.

In the future, FDsys hopes to support comments on pending legislation, a pilot project for rulemaking documents, become a leader in standardizing electronic publishing, and link the White House web site to FDsys for public search.

Moving Forward

With the success of FDsys, the GPO is looking for more ways to move government information onto easily searchable digital platforms. One of its big goals is the release of the Federal Register in XML, which improves usability by employing tags to structure data.

The GPO is also working to provide more "granular authentication" for government documents, which will allow greater usability.

"With legal and regulatory materials it is also very important to maintain the chain of custody showing exactly how each law or regulation was enacted or came into force. This provides the basis for the electronic version to be as official as a printed edition," Tappella said in July 2009.

GPO is also looking to employ "metadata," which is basically bibliographical information about online documents, used to improve search capabilities. It is also examining the possibility of exporting data as part of APIs, or "application programming interfaces."

The Network

Tapella works at the GPO, where the GPO CIO Mike Wash reports to him.

Campaign Contributions

Tapella has donated over $14,000 since 1995, all of which has gone to support Republican candidates or political action committees.

Additional Resources