Thousands of Historic California Legislative Publications Newly Available for Access

A collaboration between CDL’s Mass Digitization Team, the California Office of Legislative Counsel, and librarians at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and the California State Library has resulted in 4,000 volumes of historic California Legislative materials being digitized and opened for worldwide access in HathiTrust and Google Books. The newly accessible publications of the Assembly and Senate include introduced and amended bills published between 1911 and 1988, Statutes and Legislative Journals published between 1849 and 1988, and supporting materials including some Final Histories, Final Calendars, Appendices, and Constitutional Amendments.

While there are gaps in the series for each publication, the collaborating librarians hope to locate and digitize any missing volumes in order to make the collection comprehensive.

The digitized volumes may be searched via full text in a stand alone HathiTrust featured collection, or browsed by title and year in a Google sheet which includes a link to each volume in both HathiTrust and Google Books.

All volumes in both libraries are open for worldwide reading access. Everyone may download a page at a time on HathiTrust, and individuals affiliated with one of HathiTrust’s 140+ member institutions may login to download full-work PDFs of the volumes. Google Books provides full download of the volumes to everyone.

For more in-depth information on the collaboration and details about the digitized volumes, see HathiTrust’s blog post.