Debut of Law Collection from LC/NDLP

[Tamara Swora <tswo@xxxxxxx>]

New Law Collection from the National Digital Library Program and the Law
Library of Congress

(This message is being cross posted)

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"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
ebak@xxxxxxxx