Invaluable US government docs to be scanned and posted
Carl sez, "Public.Resource.Org and the Internet Archive have jointly announced an effort to scan a large number of historical U.S. government documents, including congressional hearings, the Congressional Record, and the Federal Register, known as "govdocs" in the library trade. The venerable Boston Public Library signed up as the first contributing library.
"Govdocs is part of a 2-prong effort to free up the $4b/year 'market' for legal information, the other prong being making U.S. case law available. Larry Lessig and Creative Commons recently joined with Public.Resource.Org to make U.S. case law available as a downloadable tarball. Link to announcement, Link to NY Times story
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latest episodes
The Google Books project has probably already got a large fraction of these scanned.
Unfortunately, even though documents authored by U.S. government employees do not have copyright protection, most of these documents are still viewable only as snippets. Example searches:
http://books.google.com/books?q=inauthor%3A%22United+States+Congress%22&as_drrb=c&as_miny=1923
http://books.google.com/books?q=inauthor%3A%22United+States+Senate%22&as_drrb=c&as_miny=1923
Those are the two big ones I am aware of. Other variations of the 'author' field that I've tried for alternate spellings and specific agencies yield at most few more thousand results each.
I've tried getting them to address this (backchannels too), but the most I ever hear back is that only pre 1923 works are *certain* to be in the public domain, and that their agreements with libraries (including the Library of Congress) precludes displaying full versions of documents obtained from libraries unless they are in the PD.
So far (and I've been giving them consistent and repeated feedback on this for two years now) pointing out that post-1923 documents authored by the US govt. are also in the PD has only yielded me silence.
Sigh.
Wow, five days later and nobody else commented on this...