Carmel: A project to increase free public access to the U.S. Statutes at Large

Joe Carmel has posted a description of a new project to increase free public access to the U.S. Statutes at Large, and a call to participate in that project: US Statutes at Large: Essential to understanding our laws and legislative history , at the Congressional Data Coalition Blog .

Here are excerpts from the post:

[...] The United States Statutes at Large is the legal and permanent evidence of all the laws enacted during a session of Congress (1 U.S.C. 112) [...]‘

[...] So far, volumes 65 through 124 (1951-2010) of the Statutes at Large [...] have been published by the Legislative Branch per the November 2010 authorization. [...]

Making more laws available

Starting in January 2014, the Congressional Data Coalition and citizens joined together to make the individual laws and other documents of the US Statutes at Large available as discreet PDF files. We’re a little over half way through the initiative but we need volunteers to help for the final push.

Rather than attempting to produce a full-text table of contents for each volume as was accomplished by GPO for the post-1950 volumes, we’ve extracted the page number where each component (public law, resolution, etc.) begins by reusing the OCRed text from the constitution.org PDF files. We then crowdsource the proofreading and correcting of the data which is where we need your help. Once the simple table of contents is completed, software extracts the individual PDF files for each sub-document. The software to do all this is open source and available online.

As of April 2014, volumes 28 through 64 (1893-1951) have been processed. We’ve also begun extracting the text from the tables of contents from the volume files and combined it with the simple table of contents data being used to create the files (sort of like a final QA check). By combining the two data sources (the text from the tables of contents along with the public law number and stat page data, we’ve been able to build more usable tables of contents. See the U. S. Statutes at Large Pre-1951 Directory. [...]

Please consider helping our effort and volunteering along with us at http://ift.tt/1hauPeS [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

Filed under: Applications, Calls for participation, Data sets, Others' scholarly or sophisticated blogposts, Projects, Technology developments Tagged: Congressional Data Coalition, Congressional Data Coalition Blog, Joe Carmel, Legis Works, Legis Works Statutes at Large Project, Legislative data, Legislative information systems, Open legislative data, U.S. Statutes at Large, United States Statutes at Large



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