Overview

The Yale Law Library owns a collection of state legislative journals consisting of some 10,000 volumes. An impressively complete set, perhaps the most complete in existence, these journals represent all fifty states, the Dakota Territory, and the Philippines. Some states’ journals begin at the time of statehood, others within a few years, and the older states within about thirty years.

While the content and format of the journals vary from state to state, most of them report daily action of both houses, including comments and sometimes debate from the floor, bills and resolutions, roll call votes, and usually full texts of amendments. Some states include addresses of the governor, reports of committees, opinions of legislative counsel, subject and bill indexes, as well as a variety of miscellaneous state documents. While some of this information can be found in other disparate sources, some is unique to the legislative journals, particularly roll call votes and introduced bills. These state materials have been elusive to researchers, and scholarship in state legal history has suffered. Many scholars of state legislative history are not aware that these volumes exist and, for those who know about them, access has been a continuing problem.

Our project goal was to analyze each state legislative journal from two distinct periods of American history. Analysis included an evaluation of the content of the journals and the condition of the materials. We hoped to determine both the desirability of making the materials publicly available online and feasibility of scanning century-old materials that have an uneven storage history.

We succeeded in gathering sufficient information to make informed decisions about potential digitization projects. However, we failed to examine each journal from each state for both time periods. The process of recalling the materials from LSF, staging them within the library, evaluating and completing data entry took significantly longer than we had projected. As a result, we evaluated about two thirds of the estimated volumes. We spent all of the SCOPA funds and contributed additional funds to ensure that we were able to evaluate a useful sample of volumes.

Accomplishments

Good data on a large sample

The volumes were recalled from LSF in groups by state and time period, so a broad cross section of the work was completed despite having to end the evaluation component of the project prior to analyzing every volume. We feel that the data gathered gives us sufficient quantitative and qualitative data to make informed decisions about future digitizing projects. We have, for example, a good idea of how many pages are in an average volume in a given timer period; this allows us to more accurately estimate the cost of digitizing a given number of volumes. Similarly, we know what specific information states included or omitted from their journals; this allows us to determine which states’ journals are most important to make available.

Complete listing of collection

In order to create the recall lists for getting the volumes back from LSF, we had to create a complete inventory of our state legislative journal holdings. We now have a complete listing of the collection and know exactly what is missing from our inventory.

Stress-tested LSF retrieval system

In order to recall nearly 1,000 books from LSF over the course of a few months, we had to coordinate with our local access services staff and LSF personnel. We learned the limits of the system and how to plan for workflow in any project that involves recalling large numbers of volumes from LSF. We also know to plan for additional retrieval costs if future workflow requires outside contractors to handle bulk retrievals from LSF.

Have enough information to make next decisions

We have gathered enough data to ensure that we can make informed decisions about any future project we may wish to undertake. In addition, we will be able to serve as a resource for any third-party project that may want to use our collection (or other similar collection) to create a digital version of the state legislative journals.

Discussed project with interested librarians and posted on GODORT site

Over the course of the year, we talked with interested librarians at conferences and participated in developing a digitization priority list for the government documents community. These discussions also led to our project being posted on the GODORT digital projects web site. This will ensure that any other library considering a similar project will contact us to prevent duplication of effort and to discuss collaboration opportunities.

Research

Discovered actual users

During the project we encountered patrons who needed to use the collection, both because we had many volumes charged out and because SCOPA’s web site raised public awareness of our collection. We had one visiting political science researcher in particular who was interested in the collection because it contains (in some cases) the only record of the voting for U.S. senators in elections prior to the 1913 ratification of the seventeenth amendment.

Found information that would not be otherwise available

In addition to information about Senate election, we also discovered that many journals have information that is otherwise unavailable, like governor’s addresses to the legislatures, text of amendments to bills and executive department reports.

Received input on other eras to consider digitizing

One historian who used the journals suggested that journals from the Progressive Era might be an even more valuable collection to digitize that the two eras this project explored.

Next steps

Complete holdings level information on existing collection

The additional information about the library’s holdings will be added to the database as time allows. This will allow easy searching of the library’s holdings and the information gathered in this project.

Explore adding MacDonald & ALA Checklist content to database for comprehensiveness

If copyright permission can be obtained from the National Association of State Libraries and the American Library Association, information from the MacDonald and ALA Checklists could be added to the database. This would allow one-stop searching for all documented state legislative journals. It would also allow easy cross-checking of the library’s holdings against these checklists.

Engage documents community and RLG to determine digitization priority

The library will remain engaged in the ongoing national discussion about government document digitization priorities. This will ensure that the work done over the course of this feasibility study will be used if and when appropriate.

Determine if commercial vendors have plans to digitize material

As with the item above, this will help reduce duplication of effort overall. However, availability of a commercial version would not preclude participating in a coordinated project to make a digitized version of the collection freely available to the public. The public domain status of much of this collection should be considered by the library if the opportunity work with a commercial vendor arises.

Pursue partnerships with other libraries & archives for specific projects

In the long term, this collection should be digitized because these primary source materials are of use to scholars working in many disciplines. To accomplish this, the library and archives communities must work together. We will pursue such partnerships and make our work available to others interested in making these materials more available to the public.

Conclusion

The work done over the course of this grant period provides the library with an excellent inventory of an important and unique resource. It illuminates the content of an important set of primary source documents in American history and political science. It also provides a starting point for moving forward with partner libraries and agencies to develop a large-scale digitization plan. We thank SCOPA and the Yale University Library for funding this important foundational work.