Primary Sources

Government Documents, or "Gov Docs," are publications issued by federal, state and local government bodies. (See the Archives tab for unpublished archival documents created or collected by government bodies.) They include a vast quantity of publications: everything from court decisions to legislative and committee reports to informational handbooks and brochures. These materials are often NOT in typical library catalogs, or have very poor representation there. To find them, you often have to go into specialized catalogs and/or databases. 

Government Documents are usually issued/accessed in different ways, depending on which agency issued them. 

• U.S. Federal Gov Docs
• British Gov Docs (links to another guide).
• For other Gov Docs, search HathiTrust with the name of the state, city or country in the author field.

To figure out which federal government bodies existed at a particular time, who worked in them, and what they did: 

Before you start looking for government documents, it is often useful to figure out which government agencies would have been issuing relevant material. Browse to the manual for the year you are researching, then look at Table of Contents or the Index. 

To search for U.S. Government Documents

Selected list of especially useful Annual Reports & Serial Publications