Case Studies

Working with Hathi Trust

State Legislative Rules

A PhD Student needs a corpus of state legislative rules for their study on political party majority and gatekeeping from all 50 states, from the beginning of each legislature. They want digital copies of all these rules so that they can run a text mining algorithm to look for significant changes to the rules over time. Once they have gathered all of this “data”, they need a place to store it while finishing the dissertation and then a place to archive the data both for future use and to contribute to the greater corpus of state gov info.

The student assembled a list of titles for each state; holdings were in print at their Library; online from agencies; and in Hathi Trust.

Issues:

  • post-1922 rules in Hathi could not be used
  • digitization and archiving of scanned print required student to seek permission from each state
  • rules from the last five to ten years are on current website of legislatures. agencies had no problem of the researcher’s downloading and use of the born digital; it was the process of converting print into digital, putting into an archive, accessible to anyone raised issues.

State Banking Agency Annual Reports

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