Accessing the Digital Collection of New York State Agency Documents

How to Search or Browse the Library's Collection

There are several ways to search the Library's catalog for public documents issued by New York State government agencies and provided in digital form.

• You can access the digital collections directly by clicking on the Digital Collections button in the catalog. Enter your search term in the search box and click the "Search Digital Collections" button.
  
  
• If you prefer to browse the collection, click the Browse button to view the documents via a hierarchy in which the agency documents are organized by individual agency within the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative Branches.
  
  
• If you are searching for electronic documents, including all documents available online (State and otherwise), you can narrow your search as follows:

Starting at the Library's online catalog, to search only electronic documents:

In the POWER SEARCH screen, in the location field, choose online instead of any. This will search all documents available online, which includes many federal, as well as State, documents. Some electronic documents may be HTML or PDF files, rather than scanned images.

Accessing a PDF Document in the Library's Collection

1. Click on the document title appearing in the Digital Collections.
   
   
2. The document will open in the Adobe Acrobat reader.

or

1. Click on the URL in the catalog record's Electronic Access field.
   

• If this is a book, there will be a single link to the document.
• If this is a periodical, all available issues will be listed. You may need to scroll to see the entire list.
• Click on the document title you want to access.

2. The document will open in the Adobe Acrobat reader.
   
   Do you use a Pop-up Blocker? The electronic documents in the Digital Collections open in a new browser window. If you have disabled "pop-ups" either through your browser or through an ad-blocking software tool, the electronic documents cannot open. If you are using your browser to block pop-ups, you may be able to allow pop-ups from specific sites, such as the Library's catalog: http://nysl.nysed.gov. If you are using other ad-blocking software or pop-up blockers, check your documentation for how to allow pop-ups from specific sites, or turn off the ad-blocking feature.
   

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Other Methods of Searching

The Checklist of Official Publications of the State of New York contains bibliographic data on each document. It's a good place to browse for information.

A Word About File Size

Anyone with robust access to the Internet may view these images via the Web; however, the scanned document files are large, and even a small document of 3 or 4 pages might be 250 KB or larger. Some documents are several hundred pages and might be over 16 mega bytes (or 16 million bytes) in size.

If you are accessing the Web over a modem and telephone line, it may take several minutes to several hours to download a scanned document. Your computer should have at least a Pentium or equivalent processor.

If you prefer, you may obtain the document or a photocopy of the document through Interlibrary Loan or through a local Depository Library.

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What's Included in the Collection of New York State Publications?

The New York State Library is currently scanning or otherwise acquiring the digital versions of New York State agency documents from the Checklist of Official Publications of the State of New York for years 1995 and forward.

Some documents have not been scanned because of copyright restrictions or request of the author(s). (See Exceptions).

More Information About Documents Which Have Been Scanned

If a document has been scanned, the following information generally appears on the first three electronic pages:

• Electronic Page 1 -- New York State Documents information page contains the following data specific to the document:
  
  
  • CALL No.:-- New York State Library call number;
  • TITLE: -- Document title;
  • AGENCY: -- New York State Agency where the printed document originated;
  • OCLC: -- a unique accession number assigned to each bibliographic record input into the OCLC Online Union Catalog. Different issues of the same serial would have the same OCLC number.
  • ISSUE: -- For serials only, the Volume, Number, and Year of the issue, as available;
  • CHECKLIST: -- Publication date of the Checklist of Official Publications of the State of New York in which the document is listed, and its number on that list;
  • Dots Per Inch (DPI) at which the document was scanned;
  • Whether it was scanned Simplex (single-sided) or Duplex (two-sided);
  • Whether the Original Document contained photos, colored paper, oversized pages, etc.;
  • Date Scanned;
  
  
• Electronic Page 2 -- Resolution chart. This page is scanned with each document and included for quality control.
• Electronic Page 3 -- The first page of the document. This may be the document cover or title page, if the document has one.

Because several electronic pages (described above) have been added, and because some pages in the original document may not have been numbered (eg. cover, title page), the electronic page number that is displayed on the toolbar of your PDF reader will not match any page numbers you may see on an imaged page or listed in a table of contents.

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Last modified: August 6, 2008/dvm
Last reviewed: October 19, 2004
URL: http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/scandocs/index.html