NH Government Digital Document Depository

NH State Government Digital Document Depository

The State Depository Library Program was established in 1973 by the state legislature to ensure that the public has access to its Government's information. The New Hampshire State Library receives 25 copies of all state publications at no cost from the agencies as part of this program (per RSA 202-B:4). The State Library distributes these copies to designated depository libraries throughout the state. Each library provides local, no-fee access to government information in all formats as part of the reference and information services provided to the public. The NH State Digital Document Depoitory is an expansion of this program.

The NH State Government Digital Document Depository includes a collection of documents electronically produced or digitally scanned by New Hampshire's state agencies and is searchable by agency, division, or keywords. This digital archive of the publications of New Hampshire state government provides direct access to state documents for all citizens and essentially makes everyone with a web browser a NH government document depository.

Documents (including pdfs, MSWord documents, and spreadsheets) are harvested automatically from the websites of each state agency on a quarterly basis and these documents are then loaded into the searchable document depository with appropriate metadata (basically the tags for the document) for use by the public. The various agencies are harvested on different days so new information will appear in the document depository regularly.

For the purposes of filing documents in the Digital Depository New Hampshire departments, offices, commissions, boards, and divisions of state government are considered "agencies." The word “Department” is omitted from the agency names. In most cases "New Hampshire" is also omitted from the names. Offices and Commissions that are operationally part of one of these larger entities are included within their appropriate agency. This list identifies those "agencies" whose digital documents are intended to be part of the NH State Government Digital Document Depository when it is fully implemented. The digital depository began as a pilot in 2008, under the name New Hampshire State Library Digital Library Collection and continues to grow as we begin harvesting documents for additional agencies.