Congrats to Mary Alice Baish

The AOL Government site has a nice write-up on the selection of GPO’s Mary Alice Baish as one of this year’s “Fastcase 50.” The Fastcase 50 are deemed to be “the fifty most interesting, provocative, and courageous leaders in the world of law, scholarship, and legal technology. From lawyers and judges to librarians and government servants.”

Mary Alice is GPO’s Superintendent of Documents and Assistant Public Printer. We at the OFR and NARA have known her for years, and particularly her work as a strong advocate for open access to government information and, not coincidentally, a valued supporter of OFR’s efforts to improve access to the Federal Register, the CFR, and our many other publications.

I first met Mary Alice when she was a leader within the American Association of Law Libraries. She was evangelizing for digital authentication of online legal materials. At first I didn’t quite understand the use case for the customer. My part of the conversation went something like: “we’re the National Archives’ Federal Register; we have our seal and carefully drafted legal statements on our websites; don’t people trust us to deliver the real Public Laws, Federal Register, and CFR?”

To be sure, the OFR was no stranger to digital signatures and paperless processing. We were among the very early adopters of federal Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology. The OFR began offering agencies the option of submitting digitally signed electronic Federal Register documents as far back as 1996. Now we get dozens of digitally signed submissions every day, authenticated with PKI tools, which we helped develop with GSA and GPO, among others. After we edit and process the signed electronic-only originals, we start a new chain of custody within the production system shared by OFR and GPO.

Even so, I didn’t quite see the customer’s viewpoint on trusted information at the end of the publication pipeline until I spoke with Mary Alice. After a few minutes of intense interrogation and listening, I was a convert, and we at the OFR have been on the digital authentication bandwagon with GPO ever since. Thanks to a push from Mary Alice, we are proud to have been out in front on the use of digital authentication for our publications, starting with the Public Laws. The OFR/GPO partnership now digitally signs the PDFs of all other major OFR publications, and we continue to examine new authentication technologies.