Congressional Hearings Digitization Project

The Law Library of Congress contains approximately 75,000 volumes of printed Congressional Committee Hearings. Committees hold hearings for a variety of purposes on legislative proposals, the functioning of government programs, subjects of controversy, and other matters.

The Law Library of Congress has recently undertaken a collaborative pilot project with Google to digitize the entire collection of hearings and make it freely available. To date, three collections have been selectively compiled as a sort of beta test:

Census: U.S.
Freedom of Information/Privacy
Immigration.

These selected hearings, presented as PDF files, are samples of a larger group that will be digitized and made available as a result of this project. Ultimately, both the Library of Congress and Google plan to provide full-text access to the larger group of hearings


Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat