Message-Id: <199803172142.OAA31406@dns.ccit.arizona.edu> Date: Tue, 17 Mar 1998 04:43:05 -0400 From: Tamara Swora <mailto:tswo@LOC.GOV> Subject: Debut of Law Collection from LC/NDLP To: mailto:IMAGELIB@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
New Law Collection from the National Digital Library Program and the Law Library of Congress(This message is being posted widely)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation" Debuts Online
The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program and the Law Library of Congress announce the online publication of the first part of "A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1873" as part of the American Memory Collections of the Library of Congress:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html.
This first release includes the records of the First and Second Congresses, 1789-1793: the House and Senate Journals, the Senate Executive Journal, the Annals of Congress, and the Journal of William Maclay, Senator from Pennsylvania in the First Congress, approximately 4,400 pages in all. The Journals are available both as digital facsimile images and as searchable texts. The Annals of Congress are available as digital facsimile images accompanied by searchable page headings (subject terms)and indexes. Users will now have unprecedented access to these historic records for research in law, history, genealogy, and many other areas.
The Law Library of Congress houses one of the fullest collections of U.S.Congressional documents in their original format. In its final form "A Century of Lawmaking" will bring together online records from the Continental Congress through the Forty-second Congress, some 355,000 pages in all. Plans for the second online release include the Journals of the Continental Congress, the records of the Constitutional Convention, and the subsequent debates over the adoption of the Constitution. Further releases will bring the records of the U.S. Congress up to 1873, the year in which the Government Printing Office assumed the publication of the proceedings of Congress in the Congressional Record. In addition, the final collection will include the United States Statutes at Large from 1789 to 1873 and the American State Papers, 1789-1838, legislative and executive documents published by Congress.
The images in this collection are bitonal TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) images scanned at 300 dpi. The text materials are presented with full text transcriptions encoded with Standard General Markup Language (SGML) according to the American Memory DTD. The text was translated to HTML 3.2 for indexing and viewing on the World Wide Web. Further information about how this collection was digitized can be found at:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwdigit.html
For further information about the collection, please contact: Emily Lind Baker Law Library of Congress National Digital Library Program mailto:ebak@loc.gov.