Brooklyn Law School Library’s subscription to HeinOnline has many libraries including the U.S. Presidential Library with nearly 500,000 pages. Its titles include Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Public Papers of the Presidents, the Weekly Compilation of the Presidential Documents, and other documents relating to U.S. presidents. The Public Papers of the Presidents begins with Herbert Hoover and concludes with George W. Bush. Compiled and published by the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration since 1957 in response to a recommendation by the National Historical Publications Commission, they are a rich collection for researchers.
The Daily Compilation of the Presidential Documents is issued through the Office of the Federal Register and contains statements, messages and other Presidential material released by the White House. It also includes: speeches, press conferences, press releases, proclamations, executive orders, acts approved by the President, and many more documents. The predecessor title, the Weekly Compilation of the Presidential Documents, is also included. The collection contains a number of other titles, including the Economic Report of the President, Hearings before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, and the Public Papers and Address of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The last collection of FDR material can now be used with the New Digital Speech Collections, recently released by the FDR Library with support from AT&T, Marist College and the Roosevelt Institute. Surprisingly it shows the famous FDR quotation in a speech just after the attack on Pearl Harbor as “a date which will live in infamy” was edited from the original “a date which will live in world history.” The collection links to FDR’s Master Speech File, one of the FDR library’s most in-demand archival collections. With over 46,000 pages of drafts, reading copies, and transcripts created throughout FDR’s career, it is the most extensive collection of primary source documents related to FDR’s lifetime of public addresses.
