It is not unusual for the Unicameral Information Office to use the time between Legislative sessions to make changes to the Unicameral web site which result in changed urls. This year is no exception. The Statutes and Constitution search link has changed to
http://uniweb.legislature.ne.gov/laws/laws.php

A new feature is the ability to search by Statute range. This could come in handy if you know the number of a specific statute and want to retreive the links to each section with a single search. For example, a search of 51-412 through 51-418 (The Publications Clearinghouse statute that authorizes the Library Commission to operate the state documents depository program) brings up a list of links for each section. Clicking on “Print Friendly Version of Search” creates a document combining the full text of all sections.

Another improved feature is the ability to perform a single keyword search for previous legislation from this site http://www.nebraskalegislature.gov/bills/search_past.php

Radio buttons allow selective searching of introduced bills, slip laws, committee statements, statements of intent, fiscal notes and amendments for any or all Legislatures from 1999 to the present.

Click here to see a list of publications received November 2008.

The Nebraska Public Documents web site got a boost November 18th when the State Records Board awarded a $25,000 grant to the UNL Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at Love Library to add more digitized reports. The site is a searchable database of digitized versions of the print collection known as Nebraska Public Documents. It consists of reports of Nebraska constitutional and state agencies spanning 1890 to 1956. So far the database includes 118,000 images for the years 1891-1929. The new grant will be enough to digitize an additional 40,000 of the estimated 114,000 that are needed to add the years 1930-1956.

In 2005 a partnership of the Library Commission, University of Nebraska at Lincoln and at Omaha, and Nebraska State Historical Society began a project to digitize microfilm copies of the documents. The Historical Society purchased the microfilm from New York Public Library with a $10,000 grant from the Library Commission. Grants of $38,000 from the Library Commission, $23,000 from the State Records Board, and $12,000 from the University of Nebraska Omaha were made to the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at UNL The Center, which hosts the site, contracted with OCLC for digitization and used open source software to create and host the database.

For more information about the Nebraska Public Documents web site visit

http://cdrh.unl.edu/nebpubdocs/index.html
or contact Katherine Walter, Chair of Digital Initiatives & Special Collections, Love Library kwalter1@unl.edu