joining the corrected text pages together to form a consolidated e-text—can be crowdsourced.
The Wikisource process has already been used to make some texts of interest to the legal community freely accessible online. Indeed, Wikisource now hosts some texts that are not yet freely available anywhere else, such as key portions of the legislative history for the landmark Copyright Act of 1976.[1] In an ongoing experiment to use the site to expand the availability of historical materials, the present author made over 70,000 pages of scanned images (taken mostly from the Library of Congress’s outstanding American Memory project[2]) and raw OCR text, representing the first forty-three volumes of the United States Statutes at Large,[3] available for proofreading and correction on Wikisource. At the time of this writing, all the public and private laws and resolutions of the First United States Congress, which sat in three sessions from March 4, 1789 to March 3, 1791, have been proofread and made publicly available by users of the site.[4] Other selected statutes and proclamations within the scanned collection have also been proofread by users with an interest in particular issues or periods in American legal history.[5] The material proofread to date represents a very small fraction of the full dataset comprising the early volumes of the Statutes at Large.[6] Nevertheless, sufficient progress has occurred so
- ↑ See H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476 (1976), http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Copyright_Law_Revision_%28House_Report_No._94 -1476%29 (last visited Feb. 12, 2010); S. Rep. No. 94-473 (1975), http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Copyright_Law_Revision_%28Senate_Report_No._94-473%29 (last visited Feb. 12, 2010).
- ↑ See supra note 69.
- ↑ This portion of the Statutes at Large represents nearly a century and a half of American statutory law (1789–1925), as well as early treaties, Presidential proclamations, and the first version of the Revised Statutes (which would grow in time to become the work we now know as the United States Code).
- ↑ See United States Statutes at Large, Vol. 1, First Congress, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Statutes_at_Large/Volume_1/1st_Congress (last visited Feb. 12, 2010).
- ↑ For example, some Wikisource editors have proofread all four of the so-called “Alien and Sedition Acts” passed by Congress in 1798 and made the proofread text available on Wikisource, with links to additional explanatory content hosted on Wikipedia. See Alien and Sedition Acts, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts (last visited Apr. 17, 2010). Other Wikisource users have been proofreading and posting the proclamations of President Theodore Roosevelt in essentially chronological order. See United States Statutes at Large, Vol. 33, Part 2, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:United_States_Statutes_at_Large_Volume_33 _Part_2 .djvu (last visited Apr. 17, 2010) and pages linked therefrom.
- ↑ The most complete volume at present is Volume 1, with approximately 25% of the pages proofread as of the time of this writing. See United States Statutes at Large Vol. 1,
