Thursday, January 19, 2012

ProQuest Congressional Guides and Tutorials

The Brooklyn Law School Library offers to the BLS community ProQuest Congressional, a comprehensive online resource for historic and current Congressional hearings, public issues, legislation, history and legal research collection of congressional information available anywhere online. Access to ProQuest Congressional is via IP Authentication and is available On-Campus only. Consult the proxy instructions for off-campus access. ProQuest Congressional offers two ways to find legislative histories. (1) Select Legislative Histories, Bills & Laws from the left-hand navigation bar; (2) Search using Basic Search Form (Congressional Publications), Advanced Search Form (Congressional Publications), or Search By Number Form (Congressional Publications).

If you select Legislative Histories, Bills & Laws from the left-hand navigation bar, use the default Keyword Search form if you know the subject matter of the law. This search can be restricted by words in the public law title or by Congress. Make sure that the default Legislative Histories option is selected. To improve your search results, use the Subject Terms link to access the controlled vocabulary subject term list. If you know the public law number, the Statutes at Large citation, or the enacted bill number associated with the legislative history for which you are searching, select the Get a Document tab and enter the number you know in the appropriate boxes. If you search using the public law number or the enacted bill number, make sure you select the appropriate Congress from the drop-down list.

If you search on the Basic or Advanced Search forms, legislative histories will be included in your search results. The Advanced Search form allows you to limit your search to return results from legislative histories only. To use the Search by Number form to search for legislative histories, select Find a Legislative History by Number from the drop-down list. You can search by Public Law Number, Statutes at Large, or Enacted Bill Number.

On the left side of ProQuest Congressional is a link to its Congressional Wiki which leads to a series of Training Videos with live demonstrations of ProQuest Congressional. There is also a set of bibliographies or LibGuides on a variety of topics from basic legal research skills to legal research guides on bankruptcy, environmental law and labor and employment.

The guides are kept current (3-6 months) and provide links to ProQuest resources that may not be easy to find otherwise. ProQuest has eight different categories: 1. Congressional Guides; 2. Current Bibliographies; 3. Database Guides; 4. Getting Started; 5. In the News; 6. Legal Research Guides; 7. Quick Start; and 8. Statistical Guides. The Congressional Guides and Quick Start guides provide users with information on how to negotiate the different databases and the Legal Research and Current Bibliographies guides provide users with relevant subject specific information.

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