U.S. Government Information Site GPO Access Shuts Down March 16

GPO Access, the online disseminator of official U.S. government publications, is shutting down permanently tomorrow, March 16th. It has gradually been replaced over the past two years by the new FDsys or Federal Digital System.

FDsys offers authentic, digitally signed PDF documents from dozens of different collections of U.S. Federal Government information (Congressional, Presidential, judicial and federal agency materials)

Some of the new system's highlights:

• Information is preserved for permanent public access
  
• Search multiple publications at once
  
• Conduct complex searches
  
• Narrow, sort, and filter search results
  
• Access documents in multiple file formats
  
• Access metadata in standard XML formats
  
• Browse by collection, Congressional committee, date, and Government author
  

GPO Access was launched in June 1994 by the Government Printing Office in Washington as the official source for American government information online. In 2009, the Office announced that it was moving to the next generation platform, FDsys. According to the FAQ, as of tomorrow:

"URL redirects will redirect users from content on GPO Access to content on FDsys. One-to-one redirect connections are in place for select GPO Access pages. Files in legacy databases on GPO Access will be automatically redirected to files in FDsys. In other cases, where one-to-one redirects are not possible, users will be redirected to the FDsys home page. FDsys will remain GPO’s only site for official Government information."