The Task Force continues to work on state documents but haven’t really made any progress.  I compliment the Indiana State Library on their inclusion of some major Indiana documents in their Digital Collection.  I attended a webinar with Chris Marshall which was fantastic.  Since I’m retired, I hadn’t kept up with their progress as much as I should have.  They have several important documents available. I was particularly pleased to see the old Documentary Journal with a lot of the department reports. Everyone should visit their site and familiarize themselves with its content.  The link is provided below.  I also compliment Andrea Glenn, State Documents Coordinator, especially on the work with Archive-It for current state documents.

Indiana Memory (Hosted Digital Collections)

• https://tinyurl.com/bur3m4yb

Indiana State Library Map Collection  [I love this page! Because it lists things by county and is amazing for “local” history research.

• https://indianamemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15078coll8

HathiTrust: Remember the full document can be seen but only Hathi members can download the entire thing.  [You can always email, and I’ll get it for you].  This is particularly great for genealogists since you can search full text.

• https://babel.hathitrust.org/

I encourage anyone who would like to join the Task Force to let me know.  Also keep me aware of needs or wants for state documents. My intent is still to use the old bibliographic tools to determine if we have the majority of pre-1906 documents digitally available.  I have started with Howe (A Descriptive Catalogue of the Official Publications of the Territory and State of Indiana from 1800 to 1890,  https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112105241865&seq=6 ).  If I get that done, I will move to put together a bibliography of ones from 1906 to the digital age which is covered with Archive-It.

I wanted to remind people of a couple of articles that we published in Indiana Libraries years ago so if you’re not aware of the tools for Indiana documents, especially historically you’d be aware of these resources.  I specifically recommend the articles by Brian Swanson and Carol Rogers.  

• Indiana Libraries. Vol. 6 No. 1 (1986). Special Issue on Government Documents.  https://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/IndianaLibraries/issue/view/764 
• Documents Librarianship in Indiana: A Historical Review. Indiana Libraries Vol. 24, No. 1 (2005). https://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/IndianaLibraries/issue/view/722

                                                Submitted by Lou Malcomb, State documents Task Force Chair.