2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

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BEST PRACTICES 2012
In the true spirit of librarianship, collaboration between the DOJ Library reference,
digitization and systems librarians allowed for the transfer of all the internal
documents onto the DOJ Internet site. The project involved downloading and
converting all of the thousands of digitized legislative history documents from the
proprietary document database – available internally – into HTML table-of-contents
pages and PDF documents for posting to the DOJ Internet. Through the diligent
work of the Library Staff’s Digitization and Systems Teams (Paul Cantwell, Team
Leader; Tim Brown; and Mark Costello), these e-legislative histories became
searchable and accessible to public viewers for the first time on the DOJ Internet in
late 2010:
http://www.justice.gov/jmd/ls/legislative_histories/legislative-histories.html.
DOJ Library Staff Contributes: Attorneys General Speeches
To contribute even more to the Department’s Open Government Plan, the DOJ
Library Staff also determined to digitize its unique paper collections of Attorneys
General Speeches to make them accessible and searchable through the DOJ
Internet web site, not only to the general public, but also to other DOJ employees
outside of the Washington, D.C. area, for the first time.
Beginning in 1933, DOJ librarians started preserving each U.S. Attorney’s General
speeches by collecting, binding, and incorporating them as individual volumes into
the DOJ Libraries’ collection. This unique collection was only available in paper
format to DOJ employees in the Washington, D.C. area. In 2009, the Library’s
Digitization Team began digitizing the entire 1933-2009 Speeches for uploading
into an internal database system, converting the thousands of paper speeches into