With their newly redesigned Web site, the Law Library of Congress is introducing several new products, including Congressional Hearings.
Here’s a blub from their Web site:
As part of the Law Library’s transition to the digital future, a collaborative pilot project was undertaken with Google, Inc. to digitize the entire collection and make it freely available to Congress and the world. Three collections have been selectively compiled to provide users with a test experience:
* Census: U.S.
* Freedom of Information/Privacy
* Immigration
These selected Hearings, presented as Adobe Acrobat PDF files, are samples of a larger group that will be digitized and made available as a result of this project. Ultimately, both the Library and Google will provide full-text access to the larger group of Hearings.
Although I love that the Google is working with libraries to make these collections available online, I’m baffled by the way that they are going about it. If the Law Library of Congress is working with them to digitize the entire collection of Congressional Hearings, why are they also digitizing copies from other library partners? See, for example Stanford and the University of MI.
Source: Lex Scripta