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Library of Congress Completes Digitization of 23 Early Presidential Collections
This is awesome! The Library of Congress has just finished a 20 year(!) project to digitize the papers of the Presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge. I hope GPO is going to catalog these collections so that the records get into library catalogs!
The Library of Congress has completed a more than two decade-long initiative to digitize the papers of nearly two dozen early presidents. The Library holds the papers of 23 presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge, all of which have been digitized and are now available online.
The Library plans to highlight each presidential collection on social media in the weeks leading up to the next presidential inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021.
Full Set of Presidential Collections
- Papers of President George Washington (1732-1799)
- Papers of President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
- Papers of President James Madison (1751-1836)
- Papers of President James Monroe (1758-1831)
- Papers of President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845)
- Papers of President Martin Van Buren (1782-1862)
- Papers of President William Henry Harrison (1773-1841)
- Papers of President John Tyler (1790-1862)
- Papers of President James K. Polk (1795-1849)
- Papers of President Zachary Taylor (1784-1850)
- Papers of President Franklin Pierce (1804-1869)
- Papers of President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
- Papers of President Andrew Johnson (1808-1875)
- Papers of President Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)
- Papers of President James A. Garfield (1831-1881)
- Papers of President Chester A. Arthur (1829-1886)
- Papers of President Grover Cleveland (1837-1908)
- Papers of President Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901)
- Papers of President William McKinley (1843-1901)
- Papers of President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
- Papers of President William Howard Taft (1857-1930)
- Papers of President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)
- Papers of President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
Announcing a Congress.gov Virtual Public Forum on September 10th!
Here’s a great chance to offer feedback and learn more about Congress.gov from the Law Library of Congress. Register now for the Congress.gov Virtual Public Forum scheduled for September 10, 2020, from 10:00 a.m. – noon EDT. They’ll be talking specifically about data modernization at the library, and who better to talk to LoC about data than government information librarians?! Sign up now!
This online event is scheduled for September 10, 2020, from 10:00 a.m. – noon EDT.
During the public forum, Robert will provide a recap of the enhancements made to Congress.gov over the last year. I will cover what we are currently working on and initial priorities for the future. We will also have a panel of our data partners, including from the House, Senate and Government Publishing Office that will discuss the data modernization occurring across Capitol Hill and the importance of data standards. Fred Simonton will provide an overview of a new survey for you to share your feedback for Congress.gov. There will also be a question and answer period to discuss enhancements and prioritization.
GODORT pens thank you letter re CRS reports. LoC needs to do this right.
I’m still giddy that CRS reports will soon be made public! The Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) of the American Library Association just wrote a letter to the Congressional Transparency Caucus thanking them for their ongoing efforts to make Congressional Research Service reports publicly available.
This comes at an especially opportune time because critics worry that Library of Congress isn’t delivering on the goods. My hope is that this public letter from a large library association, because it’s cc’d to Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden among others, will put a public spotlight on LC and maybe get them to fully deliver all CRS reports in a timely and cost-effective manner.
On behalf of the American Library Association (ALA)’s Government Documents Round Table (GODORT), I am writing to express our gratitude for the Congressional Transparency Caucus’s leadership in ensuring the public availability of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports; and to encourage the Caucus’s continued leadership in ensuring these reports are made available in a timely fashion.
The Congressional Research Service, informally known as the “think tank” of Congress, was founded in 1914. But until now, there has been no systematic, comprehensive, official source that provides all Americans equal access to their reports, even though they have been routinely released to the public by Members of Congress, made available through non-profit websites like EveryCRSReport.com and the Federation of American Scientists, and sold by commercial publishers.
Reports from the CRS are well researched and balanced documents, addressing a wide variety of current issues of importance to the American public. As such, the American Library Association-along with many other library- and open government organizations, grassroots efforts, and individual citizens-has long advocated that they be made public and distributed
through libraries in the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), administered by the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO).The first bills regarding public online access to CRS reports arose in the 105th Congress (1997-1998): S. 1578 was introduced by Sens. McCain (R-AZ) and Leahy (D-VT) in the Senate, and H.R. 3131 was introduced by Reps. Chris Shays (R-CT) and David Price (D-NC) in the House. Though these efforts were unsuccessful, the determination to make CRS reports public never wavered. With the passage of the 2018 Omnibus Appropriations Act, CRS reports will now be accessible to the American public. The Library of Congress will begin publishing nonconfidential, non-partisan reports on a publicly accessible Congressional website starting in September 2018. Once these reports are fully available, this achievement will positively contribute to the democratic process and inform citizens of the wide variety of issues before Congress.
GODORT would like to sincerely thank you and your staff for over two decades of hard work and dedication to making public access to CRS reports a reality.
Sincerely,
Shari Laster
Chair, Government Documents Round Tablecc
Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden
CRS Director Mary Mazanec
Steven Aftergood, American Federation of Scientists
Daniel Schuman, DemandProgress
Kevin Kosar, R Street Institute
Josh Tauberer, GovTrack.US
Critics say LC’s plan to publish CRS reports is a fail.
Many were thrilled earlier this spring when the FY 2018 Omnibus Appropriations Law included the “public access to all non-confidential CRS reports.”
Well, not so fast it seems. Daniel Schuman, Kevin Kosar, and Josh Tauberer (3 folks doing great work over the last several years on the CRS reports issue) have found that the “Library plan to publish CRS reports falls short of the law, and is unduly expensive.” LOC plan “does not comport with the law or best practices for creating websites and is unusually expensive,” they wrote. By contrast, their own collection of 14,000 reports on everyCRSreport.com cost about $20,000. Another point of criticism is that the the library’s plans to publish the reports only as PDF files — rather than in both HTML and PDF formats — making them harder to access on mobile devices and potentially inaccessible to people with visual impairments. The plan also apparently ignores a directive to publish a separate index of all the reports published by CRS, they said, which would make it easier for laypeople to see all available documents at once.
the group makes several important recommendations. To comply with the law, the Library should:
- Update its implementation plan to ensure that it publishes all CRS reports — we believe there are many more than the 2,900 the Implementation Plan says will be published by Spring 2019 — by the statutory deadline of September 19 of this year. We request it aim for September 17th, which is Constitution Day. The Library’s implementation extends beyond April of next year;
- Update its implementation plan to include all CRS Reports, including insights, infographics, sidebars/legal sidebars, in focus, and testimony;
- Revise its implementation plan to ensure that HTML versions of the reports are available to the public just as they are already available to Congressional staff — this would help the visually impaired read the reports as well as allow reports to be read on mobile devices;
- Revise its implementation plan to include an index of CRS reports, in accordance with the law’s requirements; and
- Review the code we published to see whether it would help the Library meet its obligations, in particular our automated author information redaction functionality, or whether the Library could develop an automated tool that would enable it to comply with the timeline.
With respect to the website design, the Library should:
- Consult with the Government Publishing Office and the public on how best to implement bulk access;
- Develop a plan to respond to any initial heavy loads on the website;
- Implement a robust website search capability and develop a plan to do so;
- Create predictable URLs for CRS reports and a landing page for a report series, and set forth a plan to do so;
- Keep down costs by examining our approach to see whether it can use some of our techniques to save money; and
- Consider engaging an entity like the General Services Administration’s 18F to help keep down costs and ensure a quality product.
So far, attempts to communicate with the Library of Congress have fallen on deaf ears. So if any of our readers have connections to Carla Hayden’s office, please forward this on to her.
Library plan to publish CRS reports falls short of the law, and is unduly expensive
GPO releases digital Congressional Record for 1911-1921
GPO is diligently working on releasing digital versions of the historic Congressional Record. The Congressional Record is now available on govinfo from 1911 – 2008. Historic!
The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) partners with the Library of Congress to release the digital version of the bound Congressional Record from 1911-1921 on GPO’s govinfo. This release covers the debates and proceedings of the 62nd through the 66th Congresses.
This era of Congress covers historical topics such as:
- The final year of the administration of President Taft, the election and reelection of President Wilson, and the election of President Harding
- Ratification of the 16th (income tax), 17th (popular election of Senators), 18th (Prohibition), and 19th (voting rights for women) Amendments to the Constitution
- Admission of New Mexico and Arizona as states
- Jeanette Rankin elected as first woman to the House of Representatives
- Establishment of the Federal Reserve
- Enactment of P.L. 62-5, capping the number of Members of the House of Representatives at 435
- Senate enactment of the cloture rule to limit debate
- Sinking of the Lusitania
- World War I
via GPO Issues Digital Release of Historical Congressional Record for 1911-1921.
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