Federal Register Digitization Project

By Benjamin Jordi
Public Affairs Specialist, National Archives and Records Administration

Digitized volumes of the Federal Register from 1990-1994 have been published on www.govinfo.gov by the Government Publishing Office (GPO). The bulk upload is the first to be made available to the public as the Office of the Federal Register and GPO digitize the historical issues of the Federal Register from 1936 to 1994. The effort will move from the latest issues to the earliest ones, a decade at a time.

To make them searchable online, the Federal Register issues were scanned using Optical Character Recognition.

“We’re excited about our first release of historical Federal Register issues online,” said OFR Director Oliver Potts. “We look forward to continuing our mission of transparent and open government by working with GPO to digitize all the historic Federal Register issues.”

This latest effort provides online access to those Federal Registers published prior to 1995. Previously, a member of the public would either have to purchase a subscription through private legal publishers or find a printed daily issue at a local Federal Depository Library or the OFR’s office in Washington, DC. In 1995, the OFR and GPO began publishing the daily issues of the Federal Register online as well as in print.

The batch from 1990-1994 includes the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and William Clinton. The newly digitized collection spans 1,253 daily issues of the Federal Register and contains 322,046 pages.