ProQuest Congressional collects congressional documents from 1789 to the present in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Congressional hearings are one of the best features of this database, alongside the CRC (Congressional Research Service) reports. It can be used to study both historical and contemporary issues that have coverage at the national level.
Aspects of the database you may be interested in:
For this example, we will look up information about Gallaudet University, which is federally chartered.
When we examine the results, we don't see as many as we might want. This is because Gallaudet University was once Gallaudet College. We can use the OR operator between the two terms (which are in quotation marks)
"Gallaudet University" OR "Gallaudet College"
or we could pull out Gallaudet like so
Gallaudet AND (College OR University)
There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. The second search might show us results where the educational institution is not being referred to as a proper noun, but we may also get any results about colleges and universities where someone with that surname is mentioned. Searching is an iterative process — try both approaches!
Gallaudet University has also been known as the National College for the Deaf and Dumb (1864-1865) and as the National Deaf-Mute College (1865-1894). It was renamed Gallaudet College in 1894. The corporate name for the institution has been the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and Columbia Institution for the Deaf. This makes it tricky to find early records about the college without using a very complex search:
(Gallaudet AND (College OR University)) OR "National Deaf-Mute College" OR "National College for the Deaf and Dumb" OR ("Columbia Institution" AND Deaf)
One reason encyclopedias are a great place to start is that you can note down any significant name changes and when they happened, which can help you structure a search when you reach government documents.
In addition to modifying your actual search, you can change the default sorting of the results — ProQuest defaults to results by relevance, but if you want to see older or newer publications first, be sure to change that.
Once we have our search, we can start browsing documents. If you want to find earlier publications, using the date limit is a great way to find only those publications in the target time period. For example, if you want information from the late 19th century, use significant dates in the chronology (for example, when the name was changed from the National Deaf-Mute College to Gallaudet College). All of this can be done on the left-hand side using the search facets.
Databases are excellent because they allow you to use serendipitous clicking. Look at the subject terms applied to specific records, the organization terms, and the legislative terms to see if there are other phrases that will help your search. Seeing how the information is structured into fields can also help you brainstorm new strategies to use when you are searching. Make sure you write down the search terms you have used in a document so you remember them later.
GovInfo is a service of the United States Government Publishing Office (GPO). It provides free public access to official publications from all three branches of the federal government, and it replaced an older tool called FDsys.
What is the GPO? According to GovInfo, "The Government Publishing Office (GPO) is a Federal legislative branch agency established in 1861. GPO’s mission is rooted in legislation codified in Title 44 U.S.C. and is Keeping America Informed as the Official, Digital, and Secure source for producing, protecting, preserving, and distributing the official publications and information products of the Federal Government."
What doesn't it include? In our Very Online age, there's often a disconnect between what we think of as a publication (like a website) and what is a traditional publication. This came to a head in 2016 with DataRescue, an international effort to preserve climate science data in case it went offline, a fear sparked in part by a similar issue that had happened in Canada several years earlier (when data was actually lost). The Internet Archive hosts archival versions of many government websites in its WayBack Machine. Only content that can be crawled without a login is there, so a lot of multimedia content from the current Internet is missing.
Here are a few searches that demonstrate what GovInfo has in it.
In our first search, we are looking for
"deaf education" OR "education of the deaf"
The left-hand side has search facets we can use to limit by collection, government unit, and/or organization.
The third result is for the Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center. We can take a look at the record to see details.
Finally, we can search individual names — like Laurent Clerc — to see where the name shows up in official government publications.
One excellent way to search for government documents at the local, state, or federal level is to use the site: operator to do a government documents search. We can use any country's government domain to search what they have made publicly available online. In this case, we will look for US government information about American Sign Language and Deaf culture. Note that culture is singular here — if we want both singular and plural, we'd need to use an OR operator. Phrase searching will not match plurals if the noun is singular. It's up to you whether you do the OR operator or not. We'll keep it simple in the screenshots so you can see more of the search box.
site:gov "american sign language" AND "deaf culture"
or
site:gov "american sign language" AND ("deaf culture" OR "deaf cultures")
If we look at the results, we will see one major problem: The NIH's PubMed interface and the Department of Education's ERIC interface both show citations and full text to literature in their respective fields. These do have .gov domains because they are government websites. They are great places to search on their own for more info, but if we want something from agencies and state governments, we need to be creative.
Here's how to take those results out:
site:gov "american sign language" AND "deaf culture" -site:ncbi.nlm.nih.gov -site:eric.ed.gov
In the above search, I have removed the results coming to us from those two resources. Let's say that we want to look at legislation, too.
If I add the word bill to my search results in quotation marks (yes, Google wants to synonym bill with the name William, and it is not convenient in this situation — putting the quotation marks around the single word will stop that from happening), the search becomes this:
site:gov "american sign language" AND "deaf culture" "bill" -site:ncbi.nlm.nih.gov -site:eric.ed.gov
Now you can see interesting results from a variety of state governments that include American Sign Language and Deaf culture in the text. Many of these documents are PDFs.
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