Digitizing the Federal Register

If you have ever tried to search our site for Federal Register documents published prior to 1994, you’ve realized that there is nothing online from 1936 to 1994. Then you may have called our office, only to find out you’d either have to come to our office or find a Federal Depository Library near you. Well, that is all about to change!

We’re excited to announce that we will be digitizing the remaining Federal Register collection from 1936 to 1994 in the coming months! In partnership with the Government Publishing Office (GPO), the collection will be processed by decade, beginning with 1990-1994. The digital collection will be released in stages as each decade is digitized. This will allow for a gradual release of the collection’s 1,778,521 pages of content. The digital output will be searchable and provide metadata down to the individual issue level. It will be made available on GPO’s site, www.fdsys.gov and here at www.federalregister.gov. The digitization project will also include the List of Subjects Affected and the Federal Register Index. 

The collection includes 14,587 individual issues of the Federal Register bound in 1,863 books. The digitization process will take months, beginning with the packaging of the entire collection, which began yesterday, October 1, 2015. Government Publishing Office staff will then review the collection for serious defects, replace any volumes where necessary, and flag the beginning and end of each individual issue. Once the collection is ready, it will be sent to the vendor for digitization.

We will be posting updates here as the project moves forward, so stay tuned!