Government documents are important sources of statistical data, legal and regulatory information, and information about government programs, public policy issues, and international relations. They are important source material for students and scholars in a variety of disciplines, including business administration, economics, journalism, political science, history, geology, and planning, public policy and management.
Document Center
The Document Center is located on the main floor of the Knight Library and is the campus' primary source for locating and using government information. The department's government information web site has a number of guides as well as links to important government Internet sites. Government information may be available in either printed publications, miroforms, or online. Document Center staff will be happy to provide assistance to students and researchers in locating needed information.
Government Information in Print
The Document Center's government publications collection contains publications from the governments of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, the State of Oregon, and cities and counties in Oregon. Also included are official records of international organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union, and statistical yearbooks from many nations. In addition to the government publications themselves, the collection houses selected commercially produced indexes and publications that support research into public affairs and governmental activities.
Most recent government publications may be found by searching the library's online catalog. The online catalog contains records for all U.S. federal documents received since February 1996, all state of Oregon documents, all Canadian government publications received since 1996, and most sales publications from international organizations. To search the library catalog for government publications, you may search by author, title, subject, or keyword, just as you would for any other material the library owns. Once you have a results list for a subject, author or title search you can click the Limit/Sort button and limit to items located in "Documents", or limit to words in the author, choosing appropriate terms (e.g. "United States" if you only want publications produced by a U.S. government agency). If you do a keyword search, just specify Location: C>DOCUMENTS in your search. Note that these are not 100% accurate methods, since the Document Center contains some publications other than government publications, and some government publications are in other parts of the library collections (e.g. Science or Knight), but the resulting list should consist primarily of government documents in the UO collection.
Many older government publications (pre-1996), historical documents and special sets of documents are not in the library catalog. For these you will need to use special finding tools. Try the Document Center's Government Bibliographic Databases page for online bibliographies, or consult one of the many print bibliographies and indexes available in the library's collection.
Government Information Online
The Internet is an increasingly important source for finding government information. The Document Center maintains an excellent set of links to various types of government web sites, finding aids, and databases in various categories, including:
For a more complete listing of categories, go to the Document Center's Government Information page.
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Maintained by: Ted D. Smith, tedsmith@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 07/28/2006
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