 She is the Director of Research Instruction at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University. She earned her BA in English and Psychology as well as her MA in English from Wake Forest and an MLIS from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In addition to managing the research and instruction programs at Wake Forest, she teaches four credit information literacy courses and is a liaison to both the political science and communication departments. She is presented at LOEX, ACRL, ALA, and regional conferences on issues ranging from copyright to technology trends to information literacy. And what little free time she has, she can be found hanging out with her two kids, watching ACC, basketball, and reading. So thank you very much, Raj, for resisting this topic. Again, this is the second time I've done this one. I did it exactly four years ago today. And so let's see where we're going to go. So this is essentially my plan. So I've got a few caveats. We'll talk about those in a minute. We're going to do a brief civics lesson. When I did this before, I seem to remember that there were a lot of people who don't do sort of government reference work or were new to the profession, and sometimes it helps to sort of review exactly what we're talking about when we're talking about congressional research. There may also be some international librarians out there for whom this will be a great sort of overview of part of the U.S. government. We'll talk about some tips and tricks. What Congress actually produces on the way of public information. How researchers may use that content. Although I know my faculty and students are continually coming up with new ways to do that, so hard to cover all that. How do you find it? We're going to talk about free sources and pay sources. And hopefully at the end, I can pop over into my web browser and show you the interface to a couple of those, a free and a fee so that you can see a little bit what's out there. There's some auxiliary services for Congress we'll talk about, and then we'll do Q and A at the end. So first of all, a caveat. I am not a full-time government information librarian. I started at this library as a graduate student, 27, 24 years ago, 23 years ago, in the Microducts End Government Information Department. And I quickly fell in love with government information. And my career took me away from it for a while. And now I'm back as a liaison for politics and international affairs. So I'll be able to answer basic information, but there is an entire profession out there of government information librarians. Some of you may consider yourself one of those or it may be auxiliary. And they are hands down the most friendly and hardworking and collaborative group of librarians. And we're going to talk at the end about how you can become more involved if you'd like to in that. So the other thing is you may have some very sort of specific questions about particular research questions on your campus. And I'm happy to either work with you offline on those. But I am in no means an expert. I'm pretty good at the basics, which is why I'm doing the basic one and not advanced. So let's start. So civics lesson. So for those of you who don't remember your school House Rack, here is a little bit about the US Congress. So it was established in the article, in the first article of the US Constitution. There's a Senate and a House of Representatives. The House has 435 members, elected every two years. The House initiates revenue raising bills and impeachment processes. So those are powers invested in the House. Senate has 100 members too from each state. In the House, I should mention that 435 members is divided up among the states, proportionate to their population. So some states have more House representatives than other states. California, for example, has the most. So that's the difference in numbers for those of you who aren't familiar with how we do this. The Senate is elected every six years. So House representatives have to run every two years. Senate runs once every six years. The Senate ratifies treaties and approves presidential appointments. And it decides the impeachment cases. So the House initiates impeachment. And the Senate decides impeachment cases. So that's a slight difference. Our Congress meets for two years, what they call Congresses. So every House member's term is a single Congress. And each Congress has two sessions. And the session is first and second. So we are currently, right now, in August. I had to check this because I can never remember. In the 114th Congress, the second session of it. And that's because we're in an election year. So starting in January, we'll start the first session of the 115th Congress with all new House and Senate members who come in to start work after this year's elections and members. So I hope that, for those of you not familiar or who haven't been in a civic class for a long, long time, sort of is a refresher for how our Congress is set up. So we're going to continue that with a little bit because this system of how a bill becomes a law factors into where all the publications come out of Congress throughout this process. So again, if you don't remember your school House Rock, the House can introduce a bill. The Senate can introduce a bill. They can't introduce them on the exact same topics as sometimes happens, or they can be completely different. Then they go to committee. So the committee of the House and the Senate, there are dozens of committees, judiciary, budget appropriations, security, all of those sorts of things there are committees for. And the committee will take up the bill. Then they will make changes to it, discuss it, have hearings about it, all of that sort of thing, bring in expert testimony so that the same thing happens on both sides, House and the Senate. Then the full committee will be voted on, will vote on that bill. And if it's passed by the committee, then it proceeds and gets on the calendar for the floor of the House or the Senate to be voted on. Once they vote on it, if it's a bill that has to be ratified by both, then the House and the Senate get together. They send it on to the president. The president can actually veto it, obviously, when they want to. If they do not veto it, if the president finds it, then it becomes a law. So we will come back to this graphic at various points, but I just wanted to remind. Introduced hearings, once the committee is done with it, they send it to the full committee. It is sent to the full Senate or House where it is voted on on the floor and theory on the floor of Congress, and then it is sent to the president for revocation. All right, so a few tips and tricks for congressional research. These are not mandatory. They're things that make research easier if you have that information. So the first of all is that our bills and our acts are numbered. They're numbered differently in House and Senate. So when you have similar bills that are going through some sort of regulatory bill that's being taken up by both, they will have a Senate number and a House number, and that's important to know. They also are sometimes named, and they are also nicknamed. So there's an official name of the bill, and then there are the nicknames of it. And an example of that, the Affordable Care Act is what it came to be called once it was passed, versus what we, the vernacular that we've come to call it is Obamacare, and sometimes that can trip people up because people know it by a shortened name or a nickname and not what it was actually called. When it was going through the House or Senate or after it was passed, so that can be tricky. Publications change names. So the annals of Congress turns into the congressional record. So sometimes you'll see citations for something and it won't look familiar, but it is actually what turned into the congressional record. The agencies also change names, and this is true throughout the executive branches. It was also true of committee names. So for example, many of you know health education and welfare was the name of a executive branch agency and then it became the Health and Human Services Department and the Education Department. So same sort of thing happens with committees in Congress, that they get names changed, and committees come and go. So there are committees that existed in the past that no longer exist and they create new committees. So sometimes you'll see a committee name that's not familiar to you and that may be because it's not around anymore. So if you were doing congressional research with a faculty or a student or a member of your community, the more names, numbers, and dates you can have, the easier your life will be. If you know the name of your congressperson, the name of the witness who came in to testify, the committee, the bill, whatever, if you know what Congress and what session that happened in, that will obviously make your life easier. When you were looking at congressional record, which is what actually happens on the floor of the Congress, that is a massive quantity of information. So if you know even a month that the vote took place, that can help you doing your research immensely because as you know, we tend to talk about things over and over and over and over again in this country. So if you know that you really want the debate on a gun control or the Equal Rights Amendment or whatever, if you know the month and the year that you want, that can help. If you know a bill number, that can really help you when you get into digging around, and serial set numbers, and we'll talk about those in a little bit, but the serial set is bound into massive volumes. So if you know the serial set number, then that can help as well. So let's go to the major publications. So Congress puts out, and I'm not 100% sure that this is still true, but the United States government as a whole for a long time was the single biggest publisher of information in the world. I bet that that is probably true. It is not all out in print anymore. You still, most of it come out in print. A lot of it is now electronic as we'll discuss. But our Congress puts out massive, massive amounts of information. So the hearings themselves are out. The serial set, which is companion information for the hearings, things that go into the committee, things that come out of the committee, congressional record, CDO, which is Congressional Budget Office, CRS, which is Congressional Research Service and Legislative Histories. Those are the main ones I'm going to talk about, although there'll be a few other things mentioned. That is not every single thing that Congress produces. There are other smaller things out there. There are treaties and other things. But these are the main ones I wanted to talk about today. All right, so let's talk about hearings, first and foremost. This is what I find students use the most in terms of doing their research. There's a lot of reasons for that. But when a Congressperson or a group of Congresspeople decide that they need to introduce a bill on some issue, because we need a new health care plan, because we need new regulations on fracking, because whatever it is, it sends it to the committees, and then the committees have hearings. And there's a lot of different purposes of the committees. But this is the committee hearings. Congressional hearings are early in the process of legislation, and they aren't always for legislation. So what are they? So they can be meetings of a Senate House joint or special select committees of Congress. So Senate and House and joint committees are all standing committees. But then special select committees can be appointed. So for example, the committee that was appointed to investigate Watergate or 9-11 or the assassination of Kennedy or MLK, all of those were special select committees that had a particular purpose, and they ran their course, and then they were done. They weren't standing committees that existed after that particular task was assigned to them. There is a link, and we'll see it at the end, on congress.gov of all of the current congressional committees, and there's an awful lot of them. Committee hearings can be used to obtain information and opinions, conduct an investigation, evaluate overseas activities of government. So they aren't always surrounding a proposed bill or piece of legislation. They are often, like the Benghazi hearings or whatever, trying to look into something that has happened about a particular political party or a particular congressperson or whatever, likes or doesn't like or wants to know more about. But they can actually be hearings to gather more information as they put together a major piece of legislation. They are sometimes exploratory in nature. Could be topics, current interests. A committee feels like they need to expose something to have particular people come in and talk. They are inherently political in a lot of ways, and so they can be really fascinating insights into sort of the horserace of politics. They are, in general, published to two months to two years after they are held. There are hearings that are never published. So these are called unpublished hearings. They can be unpublished for a lot of different reasons. They fell through the cracks. More than likely they are unpublished because someone out there thinks they have classified information or information that doesn't need to be made public. So they do have data and testimonies from a wide variety of resources. So what are they used for? They can be used for a wide variety of things, researching a particular issue or policy. These can be amazing primary source materials for students when you're looking at how regulations change after the Enron scandal or something like that. They can be looked at in our workings of Congress, how a committee structure is important, power plays among members. These are fascinating things, and faculty and students really like to delve into that. So all of that information is in there, special interests, witnesses. I've had recently several people who have been doing biographical research for various things, and if the person that you're doing research on was called as a witness, or the person is on a particular committee, then having their testimony or having the question and answer sessions from the hearings can be useful. Contract issues over time, you could look at hearings about nuclear weapons during the Cold War versus what we're talking about more recently in nuclear weapons, how does that rhetoric change? Whatever, you can also use it to evaluate the relationship between Congress and the administration, and this has done an awful lot in particularly conflict-heavy administration, Congress administration relationships, like we've had for the last seven years, confirmation hearings, for example, or the lack of confirmation hearings, as we are seeing with this particular Congress. Where do you find them? The depository library program has them in print or fees in the depository library. Lots of libraries have hung on to that print and or the micro fees of that. However, they are some of them available online for free. So now, at least I know we here in our selective depositories only get electronic records for hearings. So I know someone also picks up a lot of the links to those. So discovery services may have links. FDSIF, which is the big federal depository system, has them from the 99 to 114th Congress. I'll just double-check that from 1985 to the current. C-SPAN online has selected hearings and congress.gov actually. So since I did this presentation four years ago, congress.gov has really increased the amount of online content that they have and we'll look at it at the end, but it has the text and some video, mostly of current, more current from the mid-80s online. You can pay money for a product like ProQuest Congressional, which we have here and I can take you in at the end and show you a little bit. ProQuest Congressional has all the published and unpublished hearings in it. HINE Online and Westlaw, which are two big law legal databases. If you have a law school at your institution, then they both have hearings, various amounts of hearings in there. There may be others, this is one of the other caveats that I wanted to mention is that people may know of other free or fee online sources of some of this information. We have ProQuest Congressional, so that's what I'm most familiar with and we have HINE Online. So I tried to look up who else offered some of this. It's a massive, massive database. Okay, so now we're gonna move to serials up. So that is hearings. So the serial set has content that is created through a wide variety of legislative process. So it can be things that come into a committee while they are looking into a topic. It can be things that come back out of a committee reporting back on what the hearings on Benghazi said or something like that. And then it can also be information that they have requested from different agencies to support the legislative process. So serial set is another massive piece of content. So it began in 1817, so that's the 15th Congress, the first session. Before 1817, some of the documents can be found in what's called the American State Papers, which has been digitized at the Library of Congress. And it can include an enormous amount of information. So reports of executive departments and independent organizations, publications about the history of government, they always do tribute things. The architecture of Washington, DC, when major political figures die and their tribute volumes that come out or different people who have worked with them contribute, those are generally published as part of the serial set. During the late 19th and early 20th century, executive branch materials, in particular annual reports, were also published in the serial set. So I know we don't have the entire serial set in print, but we had a really large one. So we have moved it off site where it's better protected. But now when we walk through our print government documents, I'll see things that actually are also part of the serial set. But we pulled some of those out so that the Department of Agriculture annual reports stay together as a unit. So it is incredibly useful in researching almost anything to do with the government. Here's what it contains, five primary sorts of documents, House and Senate documents, House and Senate reports, and then Senate treaty documents. Documents are information that are coming into the committee and reports are the information that comes out of a committee. They can be reports from exterior agencies that come in to help committee members, or they can be things that the committee itself reports out once they have done their work, whatever their work was. And then obviously the Senate has the treaty documents as well, because making of treaties sits in the Senate. They can serve, so I'm a Hamilton, if anybody out there is a Hamilton freak like I am, but I was thinking as I was preparing this that in some ways this can give you that sort of federalist paper perspective about the legislative process, because this is all sort of the inner workings of thought processes, all of that data that comes in, all that stuff that comes out during the process. So it can be incredibly useful. It can also be really overwhelming when it comes to doing searches in it. So it's useful for researching a particular policy, a particular Congress, so you could look at what's going on, topics across time, organizations and institutions. Tribute volumes are really interesting and can be very useful. And like I said, the Aurelio Sirius set volumes. So this is a screenshot from the Secretary of War, which of course we don't have any more than Secretary of Defense, but we used to have a War Department. So this is about the removal of the Cherokee Indians from 1840. So there's a whole reports on all the relocation of the Cherokee, which is heartbreaking to read, but it's all there. Discussion on the Financing of Lewis and Clark Expedition. So all of that sort of historical stuff out there. It's really amazing primary source materials for students and faculty alike. It can also be used, and we don't do a lot of genealogical research, but I know it does also get used as genealogical research for people who had, for example, people in the Cherokee Indians or for people who had relatives who served in the government in some way. It can be used. So somebody can correct me if I'm wrong. It was bound for a long time, and I don't know that they're sending out the bound volumes to anybody other than the depository, the main regional depository libraries anymore, but they looked kind of like this. Earlier ones were leather bound, and they all had Congress and session numbers on them, and then they all had contiguous numberings on them. So you can get them in print. They also came out in microfiche for depository libraries, as some of you all may have retained the microfiche. You can find them online for parts of their run, but there is no place that has them online for free for the entire run of the serial set. So Library of Congress has the 23rd through the 64th. Congressional reports are here. Congressional reports are 140 to the 14th Congress have been digitized. They're working backwards in this, and eventually they will get them all done, but it is massive. Now online, ProQuest Congressional has it all, has the whole thing digitized. Kind of online, I don't think it's the entire thing, but I think it's part of it. And Redex, I was noticing, has a serial set product, and I have not investigated that. I meant to mention at the beginning that government information is not under copyright. United States government information is not protected by copyright. So you do have to cite it, but you don't actually have to have permission or pay any money if you wanna reproduce it. So that is why there's lots of people out there that can take these different publications of the government and publish them for profit if they want to. And so that's how ProQuest and Hine online and Redex, they all charge money for this, but the actual primary source material is not protected under copyright of any kind. So now we move to the congressional record, which is the third big piece of content from Congress. And congressional record is often used as a really broad term, sort of like Kleenex for tissue, but it is technically only what happens on the floor of Congress and some additional add-ins that Congress people can do. So it is not what happens in the committees. It is not in the actual bill process. It is not in the legislative process. It is what happens when a bill is introduced on the floor of Congress and there's debate about it and there's a vote. It also contains things like State of the Union addresses and other addresses made to Congress and that sort of thing. So it is what happens on the floor of the House and the floor of the Senate. It's what is technically in the congressional record plus a little bit of extra stuff. Official record of the proceedings and debate. It has changed names over time. So the annals of the Congress of the United States was the first through the 18th Congresses. It actually, I was doing some research on this, and it actually was not created until the sort of 20 years, 1834 to 1856 and they based it mostly on newspaper transcripts and some primary source documents that they had. So what exists in the annals of Congress is not a verbatim record of what happened on the floor of Congress the way it is now where there is something that is recording everything that says and it is transcribed exactly as it is said on the floor of Congress. So then it became the register of debates in Congress from the 18th Congress through the 25th and then it was a congressional globe and then it's been the congressional record since 1874 and they are all in print and online as well. So here's the important thing to know and this is what trips some people up is that members of Congress can revise or extend their remarks. So if they've only given 12 senators two minutes each to stand up and make their stand about whatever particular issue it is but the senator has 25 minutes of remarks that they actually would like to say. They can say their first two and submit the other 23 minutes in text and it can be included as an extension of remarks. It is not in earlier years always very apparent that these were things that were not said on the floor of Congress but these were things that were added in later. Now they're in different typeface and they're indicated with the bullet that they were extension of remarks but they weren't always as good earlier on about indicating that. There's a house and senate section, there's an extension of remarks, speeches to read other clarifications, not actually uttered. There's a daily digest which is a summary of what happens. There's an index for each session of Congress by the name and subject and it also contains like I said communications from the president and the executive branch memorials, petitions. I'm kind of curious how I haven't gone back to look at it as to what they're going to have there about the sit-in that the Democrats held on the floor of Congress. This is the government document scheme. I'm sitting there thinking, I wonder if that's gonna be in the congressional record because it did happen on the floor of Congress but technically it was the end of the session. So kind of interesting because there were some interesting speeches made there and I wonder if they've captured all of that. I know it's on film but I don't know if the congressional record will contain that or not when it officially comes out. So what is it used for? An awful lot. I've tracked debates on topics across time. So I've had students for example who looked at the debates on the Equal Rights Amendment because it was brought up, that amendment was brought up many, many times over several decades. And so they've looked at it that way. So let's look at what was said when it was brought up here and then again 10 years later and again all of that. You can, I've had students research the prohibition and repeal debates. Look at the language that was used there because economic arguments were used in both. So I have a lot of, so we have a real interest on this campus and political rhetoric. And so it is essentially a massive resource for someone who's into corpus linguistics, right? This is this massive tone of speeches that have been made on the floor of Congress about various issues and you can search it full text. So you can look at the term of Obamacare. I had a student this summer interested in looking at the change in terms for African-Americans. So from Negro to Black to African-American and they were looking at when the first, as the different terms came in and were used more highly and then as they faded out. So that was a really interesting project. You can look at, you can track particular members' record on particular issues. It tracks the votes, yay, nay. It can demonstrate procedure in House and Senate, changes in procedure in the House and Senate over time as well. That there are millions of other uses for it but those are some of the ones that we see here for people who are interested in the congressional record. How do you find it? Again, the imprint in the micro piece, we still get it imprinted here but we also have it in progress congressional. It is back to 1995 on congress.gov, 1994. Thomas has an American memory. Have it, there is, and I don't have an Android tablet at home. I should have tried this but there is an iOS app on it that looks just like this over here. It still looks that way. You can look at the daily digest and that House extension of remarks, all of that and then selected debates are on C-SPAN video library. So they, C-SPAN does record everything but it doesn't, I think have the video servers to keep every single debate. Again, progress congressional has it, hot online has it, also has it and again there may be other foresee places that have it. So let's look at, okay, so those are the big massive things. The hearings and all that, the cereals that comes into the committees and out of the committees and then you have the congressional record. So that is the bulk of what comes out of congress. But it's not the only thing and there's other things that come under their, the uses of congress that also publish really interesting stuff. The first is one of my favorite organizations on the planet and that is the congressional research service. So in theory, congressional research service is nonpartisan. It is kind of like a think tank. I think of it in some ways as the parallel to the government accountability office, right? But it serves congress whereas the GAO serves the executive branch and for a long time. So they're parallel in some ways. So it's Congress's think tank. Policy groups staffed by researchers, economists. It existed informally for a while. It was a legislative research service for a while and then in 1970 it was named the congressional research service. So here's the tricky thing about congressional research service. It produces this amazing amount of content. It produces data. It produces short reports. It produces infographics, info sheets. It produces long policy analyses. It does all of these things. It produces them for congresspeople. It does not produce them for the American public. Congress, somebody in Congress can submit a request for these. There's certain things that they publish annually that they publish on a regular basis. However, you cannot always get your hands on them. There are not many places out there for free that you can get them. So you can submit Freedom of Information Act requests and lots of people do and then they can get handle on them. You can go through your congressperson and request a copy of them. But it's not widely available for free. One of the reasons we went with ProQuest Congressional when it was out there, despite its cost was because it included the CRS. It can be a goal, mind of information. It can especially be interesting if what Congress's think tank is putting out is in conflict with what the executive branches think tank is putting out. And that has happened a lot in the last seven years. So that can be an interesting thing analysis of certain policies and what their impact would be. And when you've got a Republican controlled one branch and a Democrat controlled other branch. It's interesting which is why it is supposed to be nonpartisan but sometimes partisanship. And so I was just looking on there today. So they did one on the South Carolina church shooting and hate crime was published in June of 2015. And it can be really a really great source. It is tricky because sometimes people will come to you with a citation for a CRS report and it can be hard to find if you don't have something like ProQuest Congressional that has it. So then they also have a congressional budget office just like the executive branch has a budget office. And so this was created in 74. Again supposedly nonpartisan provides economic data to Congress. It does publish some of their reports under SUDOC Y10. So SUDOC is the for those of you who may not be government information librarians. SUDOC is the call numbering system of government publications that come out to depository libraries that are all around the country. Those of you who do know what SUDOC's are it's NY 10.2. And they also have a topics page back to 1994th Congress. So they are more open with their information than the congressional research services for sure. They can analyze economic impact of proposed legislation. So it's really great for policy analysis when it has to do with economic analysis of these. So they look at for example the economic impact of border security. I have sent many a student in a policy class to look out the CBO reports on that. So then I wanna talk about one thing and then I think we're getting close to the end and I'll take questions. But legislative histories are not in and of themselves really a publication. They are a string of, there's something that ties together the legislation that has gone into a particular bill. So it allows you to track a law from its first appearance as a bill in the House or the Senate all the way through all of its hearings, all of its revisions, all of its discussions, all of its votes. So this is the legislative history although we'll pop over and look at legislative insight in a minute and you can see how it looks. So most bills start out as one bill and then they might change a number. They might merge with another one and it gets a new number and then they end up in a joint thing with the Senate and the House and they both change numbers and it can be really, really hard to track how a bill changes over time if it's something that takes many years to actually get implemented. And so legislative histories can be a godsend for students who are trying to, or faculty who are trying to do that sort of longitudinal look at a particular bill. What a legislative history does is sort of give you all of that information in a package. It can link you to all the versions of the bill, all the hearings that surround the bills, any serials that, publications that were, that were either brought in to support the bill or that were published as a result of the hearings and then the debate. It is great to teach a legislative process and also to sort of look at how, how compromise can work. So a bill starts out this way and then it ends up right in subcommittee. It looks this way and then it gets to the main committee and different voices get heard and it gets mushed around and then they think they're never gonna have enough votes so they gotta change this and it goes back and forth. So it can be really remarkably useful in that. The kicker with legislative history is that the bill has to become a law and it's easiest, right? So it doesn't really do you a lot of good if it is something that failed in committee or didn't get voted through on the floor of Congress. However, if you know the public law citation for it, for example, 107.56, then you can tend to do it. There are places out there that can find them or it will pop over into ProQuest Congressional in a second, I mean, into legislative insight, which is another companion product of ProQuest. Congressional Hine Online has legislative histories, West Law, Alexis, Nexus has them. There are places on the open web that do them for major pieces of legislation. So Justice Department has some for one that are particularly justice-oriented. And so we're gonna come back to this. I was gonna pop you over into while we're talking about legislative history. So this is legislative insight, which our law school actually subscribes to, bless them for that. And so I brought up the Affordable Care Act, right? This is the Obamacare was ultimately public law 111.148. Then this tells you what the statute of law at large section is, the U.S. Code, right? This is the places in the code and there's a lot more of those. But you can look over here and you can pull up where it appears in the congressional record, what any reports that were out, any hearings, committee prints, CRS and miscellaneous publications, and if there were signing statements attached to it. And so it's this massive document, but all of these are links. And so you can go, this is the timeline of what it looks like. And then if you scroll down a little bit more, this is where it appeared and was debated in all of the congressional records. And because we have ProQuest Congressional, this links us over to those records. So it is really sort of the mother load if you're looking at major legislation sorts of things. So that's legislative insight. For those of you, I'm gonna close out of that. For those of you who haven't ever seen ProQuest Congressional, I have it up. So this is the main thing that ProQuest now also has an executive branch product which we would love to get, but we have not gotten yet. So you can see that ProQuest Congressional links you over to legislative histories, legislative insight. But then it has bills and laws, vote reports, committee prints, congressional record bound edition, daily edition, CRRS reports, hearings, serial set, executive orders, presidential proclamation. So it has all of those sorts of things. And so I always tell my students the great thing is that it's this massive primary source database on the US Congress with millions and millions, probably billions of records. And the bad thing is that it is this massive database. So it takes a little bit of getting used to they have continued to update it. And you can search full text in all of this, but you can also just search metadata. So that's what the ProQuest Congressional looks like if anyone wanted to see that. And then this is the congress.gov website which has improved so remarkably since I did this four years ago, but they have bills, they have recent action on legislation, everything that was introduced in 114th Congress, all the appropriations, current legislative activities. And then you can browse all of that congressional activity. So committees, congressional record laws, legislation by number, subject and policy areas. So you can browse all of that sort of thing back to 1973 at this point and back to the 93rd Congress. So this has been much improved in terms of the amount of information that's available just out there on our congress.gov website. So I have links in this and Linda, I just sent you the PDF of this. And on the last slide, I've also put it up on slide share, but Linda can link to this from the website. So there's a link to all the Congress and session numbers because that's sometimes very useful. I wanted to mention for those of you who are not full-time government documents librarians, but have this as part of your job or feel like you need a little bit of extra support when you're helping students or community members or faculty doing this kind of thing. There is not a better listserv to get on than the GovDocL listserv. I have, like if you want to see the beauty of librarians helping other librarians in action, the GovDocL listserv is a master class in it. And there is nothing better than having some faculty member come in with the most random, obscure government information question that you can imagine, like I had one earlier this summer, of what governors were paid in like 1870 of the governors of all the different states and not knowing the answer, but knowing that there's a place you can go. And so the GovDocL listserv is absolutely a wonderful place to throw those really sort of odd government information questions. Or if you're a new government information librarian, there is no question to basic that you won't get 20 replies on that. So anyway, GovDocL is a beautiful thing. As listservs go, it's always sort of my gold standard of how library listservs, librarian listservs. I did actually link to the schoolhouse rock. I'm just a bill if you want to watch that animated version of how a bill becomes law. And then these are three really remarkable research guides that are out there that are on congressional doing congressional research. And these are places where I gained a lot of my bullet points and that sort of thing. So I wanted to give those lovely librarians at Texas A&M and Harvard. Anyway, the thumbs up for those research guides because they're really, really terrific. And then finally, this is my email address. And then I have put this up on SlideShare. That is the tiny URL. I'm now happy to take questions if anyone wants to type a question into the box. Or if not, I'm happy to be done with that. And I hope it was useful and not too confusing for those of you who are new to the idea of doing congressional research. If you're interested in this topic, we do have quite a few other webinars that relate to this. You had a screenshot showing a search of a legislative history. What product was that? So that is ProQuest legislative insight. So it was at first part of ProQuest Congressional, but we now have legislates called legislative insight. And I think you can get it as a standalone. I don't think you have to have ProQuest Congressional. Our law school pays for that. And so if you have a law school at your institution, then it may be that they have access and our law school bless them licenses all of their products except for West Law so that we can use them as well on the other side of campus. All right, guys. Well, you know how to get in touch with Rod if you have any questions.