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Hearings and Committee Prints in the Library
These committee documents, by far the most numerous of Congressional publications, are classified Y 4 in the Documents Collection, on the Main Floor of the Library.
| Hearings include actual verbatim testimony,
as well as supporting material of any kind which the witnesses or the Committee
members want to include. Much valuable information can be found in a Hearing
on a particular subject, but it may be difficult to locate within the volume
itself. Hearings contain only very sketchy tables of contents and no indexes. Congressional Universe and CIS Index (1974-1992) provide assistance here,
since they index individual witnesses' remarks and their references include
page numbers within Hearing volumes.
Committee Prints are usually staff studies on particular subjects published to provide Committee members with background information on a particular topic. These documents can be extremely useful as overviews and are generally more "user-friendly" than the hearings. Reference materials such as compilations of laws, legislative calendars and committee rules are also often published as committee prints. |
Both Hearings and Committee Prints are kept together on the shelves and in the microfiche drawers by their particular Committees. But arrangement within Committee groups varies considerably from Committee to Committee, and, occasionally, from year to year within a single Committee. Some Committee publications are arranged in alphabetical order by subject or keyword. But the majority follow a sequential numbering scheme which occasionally separate even individual parts of the same Hearing or Print. Beginning with the 98th Congress (1983), all Senate Committee publications are given sequential numbers, with one sequence for Hearings and another for Prints. Because of all these peculiarities, use of the Online Catalog or an index (Government Publications Catalog or CIS) is strongly encouraged, instead of browsing the shelves to find relevant publications. And do not hesitate to ask a reference librarian for assistance if you have difficulty. | |
| Useful tip: Periods of
Congressional action are called "Congresses" and are numbered starting
with the beginning of the nation. A "Congress" consists of two
calendar years, divided into First and Second Sessions. For example,
the 104th Congress met during 1995 and 1996; the First
Session during 1995, and the Second during 1996. Many Congressional
publications make reference to the Congress and Session number rather than
to the year in which some action was taken or some event occurred.
The Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C., has a handy
Table of
Congressional Publication Volumes and Presidential Issuances, which gives
begining dates for Congresses back to 1789 (the listing is in PDF format).
And GPO Access provides a web page listing of
Years
and Session Dates for 1981 to the present.
Sad to say, not all hearings get printed, for whatever reasons. The Library at North Carolina State University makes available a listing, which is also searchable, of printed and unprinted Senate hearings back to the 103rd Congress. Since the unprinted hearings on the list were not distributed, many libraries will not have them (although some might be available if the librarians requested copies directly from their Senators). But the listing is valuable for historical purposes, and some may be available through Senator's offices. |
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Hearings and Committee Prints: Internet Sources
| The Blume Library Online
Catalog provides links to electronic versions of Hearings and Prints,
when this information is available. Generally these links are only found
for relatively recent publications, but some retrospective digitizing is
being done, and hopefully more older titles will eventually be linked as
well.
Congressional Universe. This database is available for on-campus use AT THE LAW LIBRARY ONLY. In addition to Congressional Universe, there are freely available internet sources of hearings and committee prints, although none of these cover historical material as thoroughly: |
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| GPO Access
GPO Access contains hearings from the 105th Congress (1997) to the present. From the GPO Access main page, select "View All" under the "Legislative Resources" heading in the center of the page. Then choose "Congressional Materials"; hearings are linked under "Congressional Committees" in this section. GPO Access has the full text of selected hearings from the 104th Congress to the present. A limited number of Committee Prints are available through GPO Access, back to the 105th Congress, but more may be accessed through individual committee web sites. You can search the hearings or prints of a particular Congress, limiting the search to House or Senate if you wish, or searching both simultaneously. The default setting is to search both House and Senate for the most recent Congress. When Appropriations Committee hearings become available for a Congress, you may specify that your search include these voluminous hearings (the default setting is to exclude them; unless you are specifically looking for an appropriations hearing, you will get better search results by excluding them, since almost any keyword you enter will appear in these hearings.) A new feature allows browsing hearing titles as well. |
Hearings and prints are available in either text or PDF format. Text files do not display charts, photographs, and other graphic materials. The PDF files are electronic copies of the full hearing, including both transcripts and illustrative material, reproduced in the same quality as the printed documents. (You must have Adobe Acrobat software on your computer to view PDF files. The software may be downloaded for free from Adobe.) Another way to look for an individual electronic hearing or print on GPO Access is to use their Catalog of Government Publications (1994-present). It contains links to publications that have electronic versions. Committee web sitesIndividual committee web sites have been getting much better in recent years about posting and archiving their hearings and prints, but quality varies from committee to committee. The easiest was to find committee websites is from House of Representatives, or Senate main web pages. Both have "Committees" prominently linked. Be aware that some committees may use terminology like "Testimony" instead of "Hearings." Committee Prints, as always, are much more difficult to find on committee web pages.
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Rutgers' Law School has an online collection of Congressional publications, including hearings and prints, dating from the 1970's, to which they are continually adding items from their collection. The Libraries at North Carolina State University have developed a comprehensive listing of Senate hearings, prints and other publications, back to 1983. In addition, the Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C. provides this handy list of links to hearings, with annotations giving the coverage dates.
Another way to get Congressional hearing testimony is through the MasterFile Premier database, which is available for St. Mary's students, faculty and staff through our databases page. In order to find hearing testimony, as well as other goverment publications, limit your search to "Primary Source Documents." The fact that the database breaks each hearing into individual chunks of testimony might make finding specific information easier than dealing with the entire hearing.
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Congress Guides Index • To list of
sources
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