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Overview
Early State Records, contains a compilation of the microfilm collection Records of the States of the United States of America that was created in the 1940's.
Included in the original project were: constitutions, the debates of constitutional conventions; statutes and early versions of compiled laws; journals and debates of the legislative bodies of the thirteen original states; administrative, executive, and court records; local, county, and city records; broadsides; records of the Native American nations; and newspapers covering British Colonial America and post-Revolutionary development. The entire collection totals roughly 2,500,000 pages or images (approximately 1900 reels including at least one supplement.)
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Collection Content
The Early State Records microfilming project was undertaken in the 1940’s by the Library of Congress in cooperation with hundreds of state and local agencies, academic institutions, and private collectors. The collection totals roughly 2,500,000 pages or images (approximately 1900 reels including at least one supplement). The project covered constitutional, legislative, executive, and administrative judiciary records of the first 48 states from their founding through the beginning of the 20th century, with the end date varying from state to state.
Included in the original project were: constitutions, the debates of constitutional conventions; statutes and early versions of compiled laws; journals and debates of the legislative bodies of the thirteen original states; administrative, executive, and court records; local, county, and city records; broadsides; records of the Native American nations; and newspapers covering British Colonial America and post-Revolutionary development.
In 2016, LLMC solicited contributions from its membership to fund "Phase One" of the Early State Records digitization, which includes content from the states on the Atlantic seaboard (13 original colonies + Maine and Florida) as well as all the Native American documents in the collection. Phase One digitization is expected to encompass 919 reels, roughly half of the microfilm collection. As of June 2017, LLMC had substantially completed digitization of records for Florida, Connecticut, and New York, among select material from other states. Phase One is estimated to require three years to complete.
Delivery
Material is hosted in LLMC-Digital alongside other resources created by LLMC for its members. Work done to date on the digitization of this collection may be found at: http://www.llmc.com/collection.aspx?type=4&coll=501.
Content is organized by state and by jurisdiction and/or type of document. LLMC Digital allows users search the full text of the entire collection, or within a subset of the collection. Search results are organized by title, volume and page within a volume, with text snippets highlighting the search terms. LLMC creates metadata at the document level, including title “abstracts” for relevant documents.
LLMC is preparing an additional call for funding for Phase One to support enhancement of metadata, including transcription of handwritten manuscripts.
Terms
Terms of access and use are governed by Terms and Conditions of participation in LLMC Digital. Annual subscriptions are available for LLMC-Digital from LLMC (all CRL members may access LLMC resources by virtue of CRL's partnership with LLMC).
Strengths and Weaknesses
The collection of Early State Records fulfills a significant gap in the historical record of the formation and governance of the U.S. states. As one scholar has noted, "The biggest obstacle to writing American legal history, in my view, is the dearth and inaccessibility of records of state legislative deliberations. Certainly before the twentieth century, and arguably up to the present day, the bulk of American governance has been at the state level, and yet for the entirety of the 1800s and most of the 1900s, there are no records at all of the floor debates in nearly all the state legislatures, nor are the records much more substantial when it comes to other legislative proceedings, such as committee deliberations and reports." Digitization of this collection will expose a wealth of primary source materials from early colonial times to the eve of the American Civil War, largely obscured or inaccessible to scholars.The materials covered by this proposed digitization project complement the somewhat parallel commercial product from Readex, American State Papers, which focuses on Federal material.
The collection is hosted within LLMC Digital. As such, utilizing the collection as a discrete body of materials may pose some challenges, particularly for researchers unfamiliar with LLMC's content organization and platform functionality. LLMC has expressed the intent to create tutorials to provide tips on searching and using LLMC resources.
Reviewers
James Simon, Center for Research Libraries
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