LoCALDig Project: One Million Pages and Counting!

As we approach summer, the IGS LoCAL Digitization Project is reaching a series of significant milestones. In just two years, the project has grown into a substantial digital collection, representing hundreds of cities and counties and capturing decades of local policy decisions. Few comparable archives of local government materials exist at this scale in a fully accessible digital format.

We officially reached our one millionth page digitized in March 2026! This page, from the 1963–64 Contra Costa County Annual Financial Report, is a perfect illustration of the kinds of materials preserved in the LoCALDig collection.

“Table 2F: Analysis of County Government Expenditures,”
Page 52 in Contra Costa County’s 1963–64 Annual Financial Report 

Like so many pages drawn from documents in the collection, this page from a 1963 financial report captures the everyday mechanics of local government expenditures. Seemingly routine records like these reveal how cities allocated resources, managed infrastructure, and supported the practical systems that kept local government functioning. The page illustrates how jurisdictions communicated financial decisions and public expenditures to the communities and taxpayers they served.

This page, and the larger financial report it comes from, also reflects an important new phase of the digitization initiative: the digitization of the library’s extensive serials collections. Financial reports like this one were often produced year after year, creating long runs that allow readers to trace changing priorities, spending patterns, and municipal growth across decades. By bringing together serial publications such as financial reports, budgets, grand jury reports, and other annually issued government publications, the project is making it possible to search, compare, and analyze thousands of individual records across time and jurisdictions online in ways that were previously impossible.

We’ve reached a number of other notable milestones as well.

By the numbers! (as of April 2026)

• Items digitized = 7,400+ and counting

• Items prepared for digitization = nearly 9,000 and counting

• Estimated total item target for digitization = >15,000!

• Number of CA cities documented = >450

• Number of CA counties documented = 58

• Date range for documents in the collection = late 1800s - present

• Oldest CA local government doc digitized so far = 1904

• Most recent born-digital CA local government document included in the collection: 2026

Milestones like this do not happen automatically. They reflect coordination across institutions and the sustained effort of library staff, student workers, and collaborators. Work on the project includes creating metadata and catalog records, scanning and processing materials, performing quality control, and integrating born-digital documents alongside print collections. This is a full time job.

From the beginning, the project has been ambitious. The library set out to digitize more than 10,000 local government publications from cities, counties, and regional agencies across California. This work serves multiple purposes.

First, it supports preservation. The library has been collecting these materials since its inception in 1919. Making them available online ensures their longevity in a new format and reduces reliance on fragile physical copies.

More importantly, it expands access. For many years, these materials were difficult to use at scale. Researchers and members of the public often had to travel to libraries or government offices to consult them in person. Even at a public institution like UC Berkeley, access was largely limited to on-site use.

The LoCAL Dig project is changing that. By making these materials openly available online, the project supports the ability of anyone to examine core materials which document how their government functions. This kind of access strengthens government accountability in a democratic society. It also enables new forms of longitudinal and computational research, allowing scholars to study not only how policies function, but how institutions evolve and how they might change.

Each page represents a chain of decisions: from its original creation in a local agency, to its preservation in a library collection, to its transformation into a digital, searchable resource.

Explore sample pages from documents within the collection, illustrating its extraordinary breadth: