WASHINGTON, DC- U.S. Government Printing Office's Gil Baldwin is this year's winner of the prestigious James Bennett Childs Award. The American Library Association's Government Documents Round Table presented the annual award to Baldwin on Sunday for his lifetime achievements and significant contributions to the library field. Baldwin serves as Director of National Bibliography Planning at the GPO. "I am honored to receive this award and to be recognized by such a tremendous, dedicated group of my peers in the library community. I look forward to continuing the important work of contributing to the growth and essential development of government documents dissemination," Baldwin said. Baldwin, who began his GPO career as a cataloger, is also part of the Office of Innovation and New Technology, which is planning and designing GPO's Future Digital System, FDsys. FDsys will be a world class information life-cycle management system. Additionally, he is concentrating his efforts on the development of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) Electronic Collection management concept and other permanent public access initiatives. Baldwin was presented with a plaque at the 2005 ALA Government Documents Round Table Reception Sunday at the Chicago-Kent College of Law in Illinois. Bruce James, Public Printer of the United States, and Judy Russell, Superintendent of Documents were on hand to watch as Baldwin received his award. This isn't the first time the prestigious award has been presented to a GPO employee. Virginia F. Saunders, Program Operations and Evaluation Specialist, and former Superintendent of Documents Francis J. Buckley, Jr. have been honored in past years. The award is named for James Bennett Childs, a longtime documents bibliographer for the Library of Congress. The GPO's core mission is to ensure that the American public has access to government information. The GPO is the Federal Government's primary centralized resource for gathering, cataloging, producing, providing, authenticating, and preserving published U.S. Government information in all its forms. GPO is responsible for the production and distribution of information products and services for all three branches of the Federal Government. In addition to publication sales, GPO makes government information available at no cost to the public through GPO Access (www.gpoaccess.gov), and through partnerships with more than 1,250 libraries nationwide participating in the Federal Depository Library Program. For more information about the GPO, please visit www.gpo.gov.