Week 4: The Brevier Legislative Reports

For my blog post this week, I’m examining the Brevier Legislative Reports collection, hosted by the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University, and partially funded by the Indiana State Library and the Indiana University Office of the Vice Provost for Research. I’ll admit that I’m a slight government info and legislative documents geek and this TEI digital collection caught my eye as I was searching the TEI’s website for a project to comment on for this week’s blog post.

As stated on the collection’s homepage, the Brevier Legislative Reports, “published biennially from 1858 to 1887, are verbatim reports of thelegislative history of the Indiana General Assembly during those years.” From my own knowledge of parliamentary papers from this time period, verbatim records of legislative sessions were not all that common. The explanatory note from the Brevier collection’s website also mentions the difficulty in conducting legislative history research in Indiana due to the lack of documents from this period. This research is particularly important has it provides legislator’s “intent when creatingcertain laws and their opposition to the need for vary legislation.” This isn’t only important from a historical studies perspective, but also from a legal perspective has legislative intent is a burgeoning area in legal scholarship and something the courts are more and more willing to accept.

In terms of the technical (XML/TEI) information provided, the Brevier Legislative Reports collection offers a statement of how it uses TEI Guidelines, version P5. Those spearheading the collection claim to adhere to Level 3 of the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries. Level 3 must ensure that “the text is created by conversion, either by way of OCR or keyboarding. Some structural elements of the text are encoded. The text may be used with or without page images.” The Best Practices document indicates TEI use on a five-level scale. One element of moving up the scale is related to the level of encoding—the more detailed the encoding, the higher the level.

The explanatory note from the Brevier collection mentions that, due to limited resources, the encoding is to: Senate and House Proceedings, Enacted Legislation, Resolutions, Votes, Roll Call, Committees, and Supplementary materials. The advanced search function allows for searching specific fields related to some of these elements.

Screenshot from: http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/brevier/search?smode=advanced&brand=brevier

Advanced Search Function, Brevier Legislative Reports collection, Indiana University.

The collection provides the XML code to all the volumes of the reports, which are freely available on the website. I found looking into the code a useful exercise in helping me better understand how XML works and its power to create searches and databases. The “vote” field in the advanced search is represented in the XML with textual divisions that are then tagged with “vote” and are represented in the XML as <div type=“vote”>. (See example at line 6081 from the screenshot below.) Therefore, when a researcher is looking for a vote on a particular item, they can input this item into the search box with the vote field selected.

Screenshot of XML Code

Indiana General Assembly, Hall of House of Representative, Brevier Legislative Reports, Regular Session of 1871, 11 January 1871.

The project leaders acknowledge the difficulty in encoding these documents given just how rich with information they are. The strategy employed in developing an encoding scheme focused mainly on legislative procedures and functions, given that the purpose of parliamentary reports are to highlight the steps of resolutions or legislation being adopted or rejected by the legislature. For instance, the project leaders recognize the personal name standardization remains an outstanding issue.

The collection’s website list one presentation regarding the development of the collection, however the link to the PDF file is broken.

I found delving into an unfamiliar TEI digital project to be a useful exercise in helping me think through some issue that I might encounter in my encoding challenge assignment. Specifically, Sperberg-McQueen’s axiom that “no markup language with a finite vocabulary can be complete” (p. 36) became visible to me. The Brevier collection project leaders’ explanation of choice made makes it clear that there is still so much more from the collection that can be encoded and thus extrapolated by future researchers. As a begin my encoding challenge, it is important to consider critically consider the tags and categories that should be searchable.

References:

Indiana University Maurer School of Law Library and Indiana University Digital Library Program. Brevier Legislative Reports Digitization Project. 4 February 2016. http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/law/brevier/VAA8558-21.

Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. "Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts." Literary and Linguistic Computing 6, no. 1 (1991): 34-46.

TEI SIG on Libraries. Best Practices for TEI in Libraries: A TEI Project, eds. Kevin Hawkins, Michelle Dalmau, and Syd Bauman. Version 3.0, October 2011, http://www.tei-c.org/SIG/Libraries/teiinlibraries/main-driver.html.