Wednesday, September 12, 2018

California Legislative History Digitized

[We're grateful to Joanna Grisinger for drawing this announcement to our attention.]

Thousands of Historical California Legislative Publications Digitized and Openly Available Online Paul Fogel, Manager & Technical Lead, Mass Digitization, California Digital Library

California historical legislative research just got a bit easier. As a result of a collaboration between the California Office of Legislative Counsel and librarians at the University of California, Stanford University and the California State Library, nearly 4,000 California Assembly and Senate publications are now online and have been opened for reading access to everyone worldwide. They are available in the HathiTrust Digital Library as a featured collection, as well as individually in Google Books.

The project was initiated at the University of California's California Digital Library (CDL) by current HathiTrust Program Officer for Federal Documents and Collections Heather Christenson.  CDL worked with California's Office of Legislative Counsel to clarify language in recently approved California Assembly Bill no. 884 to confirm that the collected set of historical publications of California legislative output are indeed in the public domain and can be broadly shared.  The recently opened volumes were digitized as part of the Google Books project from copies collected by UC Berkeley and many other university libraries and have been aggregated in the HathiTrust Digital Library, a partnership of over 140 academic and research libraries

[More.]