While government sometimes has a reputation for not being able to do anything right, there's one thing it has proven supremely good at over the years: generating mountains of official documents. The Internet Archive, Public.Resource.Org, and the Boston Public Library today announced a plan to scan more than 60 million pages of these government documents over the next two years, with plans to make them freely available in perpetuity.

The first part of the program, which is currently funded, will scan fifty years' worth of Congressional hearings (1936-1986) held by the Boston Public Library. The scanning will be done using special scan stations developed by the Internet Archive, and should be complete within the year.

Assuming that all goes well and more funding can be found, the project will then move on to phase two: scanning 60 million pages from sources like the Congressional Record and the Federal Register.

The resulting data will be read with optical character recognition software to produce searchable versions of the documents (and we hope the software works well, since it's unlikely human eyes will ever proofread most of it). The data will be placed in the public domain and kept at the Internet Archive, the Boston Public Library, and anywhere else interested in hosting a copy of the archive.

The entire project is only one of many intriguing recent projects to make publicly-available government docs more, well, publicly available. Creative Commons has recently partnered with Public.Resource.Org to create an archive of all federal case law, while Columbia's Tim Wu helped launch a service that provides full access to court records. More power to all of them.