New York City's Green Book Becomes Online Directory The greening of New York's Green Book is complete. NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services The cover of the new online Green Book shows Birdie, the mascot for New York City's environmental initiatives, with a Statue of Liberty crown and a compact fluorescent light bulb. On Friday, the Bloomberg administration plans to unveil www.nyc.gov/greenbook, which will be the city's official government directory, ushering into the 21st century what was a decades-old tradition of publishing an annual softcover book. The new cover features Birdie NYC, the city's mascot for its environmental initiatives, holding a compact fluorescent light bulb and wearing a Statue of Liberty crown. Last published in 2008, the Green Book will now be searchable online and updated at least four times a year. There are tabs for city, county and state agencies, detailing the functions of each office, the salaries of agency heads, the names and phone numbers of major personnel, and more, with federal and judicial tabs to come. Hyperlinks connect users to individual agency Web sites and to a few e-mail addresses, said Lauren Passalacqua, a spokeswoman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. A limited number of printed copies will still be available for sale, starting in June. But the city wants the free digital version to be the primary directory. "In our ever-more interconnected world, information technology has become essential to civic engagement," Mr. Bloomberg wrote in an introduction to the directory. We are determined to provide the most responsive, most sustainable and most forward-thinking government possible. This directory is the latest example of our commitment to that goal. The publication of the online directory concludes what was a source of frustration and puzzlement in recent years for the lobbyists, journalists and others who had relied on the Green Book to figure out who did what in government or to look up obscure facts. As recently as March 2011, city officials said there were no plans to put the directory online and attributed the delay in publishing a new print edition to the fact that there were too many items to update. But after Daniel R. Garodnick, a city councilman from the East Side of Manhattan, asked the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, the publisher of the Green Book, why the book's future was so "shrouded in mystery," the agency's commissioner responded in January by hinting that a "more environmentally friendly version" was in the works. A preview of the Web site that was shown to The New York Times indicated that it remained a work in progress, lacking much of the historical and esoteric information from the front and back ends of the previous print editions. There is no list, for example, of the city's mayors (Page 2 of the 2008-9 edition). Also missing from the online directory is a section that listed the agencies in charge of licensing everything from auctioneers (the Department of Consumer Affairs) to zoning special permits (either the Department of City Planning or the Board of Standards and Appeals). Ms. Passalacqua said that much of this information was already available elsewhere on nyc.gov.