Thanks to work by state employees and a nonprofit group, more than 450,000 state documents dating back to Iowa’s early history are now online and available to anyone with computer access.
Since 2010, workers at the state’s libraries have been shipping hard copies of every Iowa bill, act and territorial agreement they can find to the Law Library Microform Consortium in Kaneohe. The documents date back to 1838, eight years before Iowa became a state.
Employees at the Law Library Microform Consortium have spent hundreds of hours scanning the documents and then posting data on a searchable online database.
“Essentially, we’ll have one of the most complete freely accessible collections of historical state legal materials in the country,” said Cory Quist, a law librarian at the State Library of Iowa.
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Staff in Iowa and Hawaii have scanned and shared almost 460,000 documents from 583 volumes of Iowa legislative history. That amounts to about 95 percent of the desired archive, which includes all Iowa Codes, Senate and House daily journals that list day-to-day action and votes in the chambers, drafts of bills that never became law and the Iowa attorney general’s annual reports and legal opinions.
Access Materials via Iowa Legislature Web Site
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