Brevier Legislative Reports

General description: The (Brevier Reports), published biennially from 1858 to 1887, are verbatim reports of the legislative history of the Indiana General Assembly that also include messages from the Governor, biographical sketches of legislative members, lists of enacted legislation and more. The Brevier Reports capture the impact of significant historical events surrounding the Civil War along with other issues before the Indiana General Assembly. This is a unique set of documents — there exists no other such detailed and comprehensive record of the debate and speeches delivered from the floor of the Indiana Senate chamber and the Hall of the House of Representatives for this time period.

Implementation description: Twenty two bibliographic volumes some 200–700 pages in length were converted to full text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, Abbyy Reader, and encoded at the volume-level following the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, version P5, adhering as much as possible to Level 3 of the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries (http://purl.org/TEI/teiinlibraries) [1]. The TEI/XML files for each volume are available for downloading. To learn more about general encoding strategies and challenges visit the Encoding Overview: http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/brevier/projectinfo/encoding.do. The delivery and discovery capabilities of this site are implemented using a customized version of the open source eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) developed by the California Digital Library. It is served using the Tomcat application server and Apache HTTP Server software. Local customizations to XTF at Indiana University include a unique native page image viewer and a page turner that are both driven exclusively by the information encoded in the source TEI files and require no additional software beyond what can be accomplished by customizing XTF's XSLT templates. This feature enables switching between text and page images at any time while navigating a document's structure, and allows viewing of one or more page images as moveable overlays simultaneously with the text in the paged text mode. The actual page images are stored and delivered via the IU Digital Library Program's Fedora repository. The site also uses a newer XTF feature called sub-document indexing. This allows encoding entire volumes of the Brevier Legislative Reports as the source TEI documents yet enables access at more granular levels. In this case, search and browse results are not the full volumes as they exist in the XTF library but are instead TEI divisions within the volumes representing such things as legislative days, indices, or supplementary materials. Following an item link in a search result retrieves the sub-document in context to the volume in its entirety.

Copyright information: Indiana University makes no claim of copyright to the original texts, which have been published before 1923 and are, therefore, in the public domain. Permission is granted to download, transmit or otherwise reproduce, distribute or display the original texts so long as the header is included in its entirety. Indiana University makes a claim of copyright only to original contributions made by the Brevier Legislative Reports project team. All other use, including but not limited to commercial or scholarly reproductions, redistribution, publication or transmission, whether by electronic means or otherwise, is strictly prohibited without the prior permission of the copyright holder. Determination of the status of an online document ultimately rests with the person desiring to reproduce or use the item. If you have any questions or for general inquiries, contact the Indiana University Digital Library Program, diglib@indiana.edu.

Contact: Michelle Dalmau, Indiana University Digital Library Program, Herman B Wells Library, 1320 East 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47401, USA.

Telephone: 18128551261

Email: mdalmau@indiana.edu