The Rutgers Law Library U.S. Congressional documents digitization collection

The motivations and processes developed at Rutgers Law Library for digitizing their print collection of United States Congressional hearings and committee prints, dating from 1967 to 2000 are discussed in this Chapter. Both the technical and collection goals of the project, and the important practical details of how it is being accomplished are described. The main theoretical goal was to show how a large scale digitization project could result in a useable, good quality, and sustainable collection while keeping costs at a scale that many institutions might consider affordable. The collection consists of over 25,000 documents. They are committee hearings and other print material that are generated as part of the U.S. Congress' legislative and oversight roles. Although the materials have been unbound, scanned, and checked for quality by hand, most other processes have been automated to minimize cost. Equipment and other expenses have also been kept to a minimum, but without compromise to overall readability, and archival quality.