New era for Government Printing Office

Official newspaper will soon be available in electronic format and a museum and library are to be founded under changed legislation

Nowadays the Government Printing Press (above) is computerized. One purpose of the draft legislation setting up the museum and printing office as a private entity is to showcase the old machines in the extant museum.

By Maria Delithanassi - Kathimerini

It is the end of an era for the Greek Government Printing Office and Government Gazette, which is to be digitized. An entire life cycle has been completed and a new curtain is rising. One-hundred-and-eighty years of printing, 180 years of national legislation and political history.

The Gazette is an historical document in itself, revealing within its pages Greece’s political, economic and social history. (It was first issued in Nafplion in 1825.)

Published in the official Government Gazette were the Constitution, which established the character of the fledgling Greek state, laws and provisos, which highlighted each government’s attempts to foster development.

Twenty-five years after the last law was passed governing the operations of the Government Printing Office (1981) and 30 years after the last law on the Official Government Gazette (1976), Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos has submitted a new bill to Parliament regarding the operations of the Government Printing Office and the Government Gazette’s publication content and issue.

Special Secretary for the Government Printing Office Patroklos Georgiadis said: “The new bill makes provisions for the publication of a new supplement where all appointments, secondments, recruiting bodies and members of boards of directors will be published. This is to ensure more transparency so that citizens are aware of who is appointed by each government in civil service positions. Today all of this information is scattered among various publications along with other decisions and it is almost impossible to obtain the information.”

Second, the bill establishes a database for the Government Printing Office, reorganizing and adapting its operations to new technologies.

The third main feature of the bill, according to Georgiadis, is the foundation of the Government Printing Office Museum and Library as a private entity.

The aim is partly to preserve this enormous historical archive and to make it available to the public in digital format, as well as to showcase the machines in the extant museum and the history of printing in Greece.

The museum and library will be housed in a building on Solomou Street, adjacent to Kapodistriou Street, where the Printing Office has been housed since 1917. An educational section and seminar and conference areas are also planned for the newly renovated building.

With the digitalization of the government newspaper’s pages (www.et.gr) the public will gain access to issues of the Government Gazette since the foundation of the Greek state. As Georgiadis pointed out, a digital signature will be applied (security protocol) to ensure the content is genuine and has not been falsified. Prepaid electronic cards will be issued (for 5 and 20 euros) to enable printing of the Government Gazette from a personal computer. The electronic library will also provide links to the European Commission’s main library, the National Library and university libraries both in Greece and abroad.