The federal government churns out a LOT of documents every working day -- every branch, every agency, every office. The result is a blizzard of paper that's unwieldly and bulky and expensive...and now, at least in part, obsolete.
This month, over a million federal documents were published online -- full text, indexed, searchable, downloadable, reusable. And among that million is one document of particular interest: DCPD20090001.
That document is here:
DCPD200900001
which translates as: Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents, year 2009, serial number 00001.
You watched it, heard it, read it on Tuesday, January 20, 2009, a little after noon EST as it was presented by President Barack H. Obama in Washington, DC: it's the Inaugural Address.
Every Presidential document -- every proclamation, every finding, every executive order, every statement -- will follow. In the past, all of these were collected and published once a week in the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents. Now they'll come out every day.
Here are the documents issued so far by our new President and processed through this system:
Week ending January 23
Week ending January 30
This document category not only includes everything new that's coming out,
it includes everything back to 1993:
Compilation of Presidential Documents
That's one of the document categories that's already live. The others are:
Congressional Bills (103rd Congress to Present)
Congressional Documents (104th Congress to Present)
Congressional Hearings (105th Congress to Present)
Congressional Record (1994 to Present)
Congressional Reports (104th Congress to Present)
Federal Register (1994 to Present)
Public and Private Laws (104th Congress to Present)
All of these combined include over a million documents already, with new ones being added as they arrive, and old ones being backfilled as issues with them are identified and corrected.
Dozens of other document categories are also going to be brought online between now and mid-2009, and that process should raise the document population to something around 10 million. Those categories will include things like the Congressional calendar, the budget, the President's economic report, export regulations, Supreme Court decisions, etc.
You can browse them. You can search them. You can reindex them. You can download them -- and the metadata that goes with them, which is available in XML. You could, if you wanted, grab them all, and feed them to your own search engine, or archive them, or whatever.
Start here:
GPO Federated Digital System
Part 2 will cover searching; this site has a number of advanced features to help locate relevant documents.