Some of the most-used resources we have in the State Library are our collections of books that contain facts and images of legislators and public officials of the Commonwealth. These books, dating from 1885-2018, include the Official Gazette, the Souvenir of Massachusetts Legislators, and the Public Officers of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, also known as Bird Books. These books are particularly useful when researching the terms of legislators and for finding biographical information about them. They also contain photographs of legislators in the early 1900s which can be difficult to come by otherwise.
The library’s copies of these books are very fragile, so if you’d like to use them to do your research, please handle them with care. As always, photography is welcome as long as you don’t use flash.
While the physical copies of the Bird Books are great, we also have them available on our digital repository. They are keyword searchable and are available as PDFs. Take a look at these volumes here.
Back in 2008, the library undertook a project to preserve some of the more fragile volumes. The volumes that were focused on were from the 1920s-1940s, as many of their leather covers were deteriorating. Read more about this project in this blog post. If you have any questions about these resources, contact us at Reference.Department@mass.gov.
Jessica Shrey
Reference Librarian
