U.S. Federal Documents Program

Digital access to U.S. Federal Documents and preservation of the governmental record strengthens democracy and citizens’ participation in it. HathiTrust coordinates collective action to build and maintain the largest independent collection of digitized and preserved U.S. Federal Documents. The collaborative program improves digital quality and resource discovery, collaborates with shared print collection initiatives, and enables broader access to a growing range of materials published by the U.S government for research and scholarship.

Benefits of the U.S. Federal Documents Program

Preserve the Public Record for Access

• Provide enduring access to the published record of U.S. government in a non-commercial, library-managed environment.
• Access digitized items from dozens of entities including Congressional Committee Hearings, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Army.
• Provide an alternative to subscription platforms that offer U.S. Government publications as licensed content. Most titles in HathiTrust’s U.S. Fed Docs collection are available for reading access in the U.S. public domain (some globally).

Empower Community and Democracy

• Solve shared problems related to identifying, cataloging, digitizing, organizing, preserving, hosting, and providing access to U.S. federal documents held by libraries.
• Draw on an expert group of member advisors who bring perspective to strategy and collection decisions. 
• Enable journalistic, legal, scholarly, and independent research using U.S. government publications through digital access to items otherwise held only in print.