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GPO releases digital Congressional Record for the 1960s
The Government Publishing Office (GPO) just announced that GPO in concert with Library of Congress have released another decade of historic bound Congressional Record, this time covering 1961 – 1970. The CR is now available on govinfo.gov for 1961 – 2006. This release covers debates and proceedings of the 87th through the 91st Congresses. Spanning […]
GPO releases digital Congressional Record for the 1970s
The Government Publishing Office just announced that they’ve released another decade of historic bound Congressional Record, this time covering 1971 – 1980. The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) partners with the Library of Congress to release the digital version of the bound Congressional Record from 1971-1980 on GPO’s govinfo system. This release covers debates and […]
GPO releases digital Congressional Record for the 1980s
Back in September, 2016, we posted about the project undertaken by the Government Publishing Office and Library of Congress to digitize the Congressional Record in its entirety back to 1873. At that time, GPO released volumes from 1991 – 1998 (covering the 102nd – 105th Congresses). Today, GPO issued a press release about the next […]
GPO & Library of Congress begin release of digitized Congressional Record
This is good news. Today GPO announced the first release of digitized volumes of the Congressional Record, part of a collaborative project between GPO and the Library of Congress. The plan is to go back to volume 1, 1873. So stay tuned for additional releases. The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) partners with the Library […]
Document of the day. Or why a paper document may be better than a digitized version
I just received an old (historic NOT legacy) Department of Commerce publication off of the needs and offers list called "Commercial handbook of China" by Julean Arnold, commercial attaché (WorldCat record). It's actually a 1975 reprint of a 1919 publication. It's chock full of statistics relating to provinces, cities, and consular districts -- agriculture, minerals and mining, populations, exports and imports, revenues, transportation, ports and shipping facilities etc. In short, this is a gold mine of historic information and statistics from the Republic of China (pre-Communist China). The document was digitized and is available in HathiTrust as well as the Internet Archive (see book reader below). However, in comparing the digitized version with the paper version in hand, I came upon several issues:
- there are 3 foldout maps that were not digitized. These maps are critical information on railway lines and treaty ports in China. The bibliographic record has a physical description including "2 v. fronts., plates, fold. map, tables, diagrs., fold. charts" but no content note mentioning that the maps were not digitized.
- As I mentioned, the document is chock full of statistical tables. Have you ever tried copying and pasting tabular data from a PDF? It's even worse when the tables are displayed in landscape rather than portrait. I've verified that the OCR fails on those pages.
- Lots of readability/usability issues: The table of contents is partially obscured in one copy and the tables are often blurred or faint. also, HT is using a process of OCR now where you can search but not copy or paste.
- Lastly, I find it ... uh... interesting that this book says here "Copyright: Public Domain, Google-digitized." But, if you want to download the whole book, you have to be an HT partner.
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