New e-resource: LexisNexis Congressional Hearings Digital Collection

Announcing one of the latest acquisitions of the USF Libraries—the purchase of the LexisNexis Congressional Hearings Digital Collection.

“What do oil executives, intelligence, the Pearl Harbor attacks, and baseball have in common? All are topics discussed in congressional hearings. Hearings are often the most requested of all government documents in a library as they have real-life stories, statistics, expert testimony, and the drama of the interrogation all rolled into a single document. Hearings give researchers the ability to discover to whom Congress is listening, who the players were in an issue, and how they positioned themselves in the debate.
Through hearings, researchers can study what a pediatrician in the Love Canal area said when responding to questions from Senator Albert Gore, Jr., about health hazards related to the dumping of hazardous waste there. More is written on hearings than on other areas of congressional publications” (Sevetson).

The LexisNexis Congressional Hearings Digital Collection is a compilation of published and unpublished Congressional hearings from 1824-2003 that forms a documentary record of events and public policy faced by the United States. Published hearings are the official record of committee hearings proceedings that are printed by the Government Printing Office (GPO) and include the diverse information presented at committee hearings. Unpublished hearings in the digital collection include historical primary documents from both Senate and House committees from the period between (1823-1976). Other content in the Digital Collection includes: transcripts of sessions between the committee and witnesses, other written and oral statements of witnesses, special reports, exhibits, statistical reports, and other materials submitted for the record by witnesses. The Congressional Hearings Digital Collection can be searched by terms such as: title, keyword, subject, committee name, or Superintendant of Documents number. Search results are displayed in full text format and include both print and email functions. Provides a useful “Help Toolbox” that assists the user in properly citing hearings, provides practice scenarios, outlines the legislative process, and supplies information that serves as a backdrop to hearings within the framework of the U.S. government. This resource supports both undergraduate and graduate studies.

The LexisNexis Congressional Hearings Digital Collection contains 119,200 titles and 24.69 million pages. Over 106,000 MARC records for this collection have been loaded in the library catalog with approximately 5,000 more to load, when they become available.

For this database and other library resources visit http://poly.usf.edu/library. Click on Search the databases to begin.

Sevetson, A. Hearings and the LexisNexis Congressional Hearings Digital Collection. http://library.lexisnexis.com/ksc_assets/subscriber_resources/hearingswhitepaper.pdf