About
The original Nebraska Public Documents project was a collaborative effort between the Nebraska Library Commission, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the University of Nebraska-Omaha, and the Nebraska State Historical Society. It was hosted online by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from 2007 to 2024. The website is now hosted by the Nebraska Library Commission.
Description
Nebraska Public Documents is a publication comparable to the federal U.S. Serial Set but for the state of Nebraska. Until 2007, the publication was not widely available, often in fragile condition, and not indexed. Digitization of these documents was first proposed by James Shaw, Government Documents Librarian at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
In the first phase of the project, Nebraska documents in the collections at the New York Public Library, microfilmed in the 1990s with funds from the National Endowmnent for the Humanities, were digitized through a University of Nebraska-Lincoln contract with the OCLC Preservation Service in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Using raw data supplied by OCLC, a template for enhancements and search applications was created by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
In 2019 all of the reports were rescanned by Lori Sailors of the Nebraska Library Commission from original paper copies--5,155 documents for a total of 520,746 pages--with enhanced OCR, printing and downloading capabilities added. Many documents, which were missing from the orignal microfilm, have been added, and will continue to be added as they are located and digitized. Users will notice that digitized reports prior to 1891 are very scattered, and so we encourage you to use this site as a means of winnowing data.