Fall Update on Legal Information From Washington, DC

The U.S. Congress may not be getting much done, but the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) and the Law Library of Congress continue to work on making U.S. legal information more accessible. On September 15^th the GPO announced that it had “digitized the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications, a historical list of publications the Federal Government produced from 1895 to 2004, as well as other historic government publication indexes. Librarians, scholars, students, and the general public can use these indexes to find historic publications of the U.S. Government. These indexes have been digitized and published for the public to access for free on GPO’s govinfo, the one-stop site for authentic information published by the Government….The public may access the Monthly Catalog and Government Document Indexes at https://www.govinfo.gov/collection/monthly-catalog and at
https://www.govinfo.gov/collection/government-document-indexes .”

Next on September 28^th GPO announced that “(GPO), in collaboration with the Law Library of Congress, has digitized and made available volumes of the United States Congressional Serial Set on GPO’s govinfo, the one-stop shop to information published by the Federal Government. The release comes as part of a large decade-long partnership to digitize more than 15,000 volumes and more than 9.4 million pages of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set back to the first volume, which was published in 1817. GPO and the Law Library began this digitization effort two years ago.

This first public release contains selected volumes from the 69th Congress (1925–1927), the 82nd Congress (1951–1953), and several 19th century Congresses. The public can access these volumes of the Serial Set on govinfo at https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/serialset … The remaining 15,118 volumes will be released throughout the next ten years.”

On September 27^th the Law Library of Congress posted on their blog a link to a video about the latest enhancements to congress.gov. “In addition to this video being added to the Enhancement Timeline with this release, the Congressional Record Bound edition is now available for the 63rd-65th Congresses (1913-1919).”