Congressional Hearings
When considering a bill, Congress may hold hearings to find out more about the subject matter of the legislation or to determine how different interest groups feel about the issues involved. Committee hearings can be good sources of information on a particular topic.
Hearings consist of transcripts of oral testimony and may also include prepared statements or written reports or studies presented to the committee by the witness. Official hearings publications are printed by the Government Printing Office and contain all witness testimony, the question-and-answer portion of the hearing, and any other material requested of the witness by the committee. Not all hearings are published. Until official publication, all that may be available are individual transcripts of testimony. Two commercial services, Federal News Service and CQ Transcripts, selectively transcribe committee hearings and provide them to LexisNexis and Westlaw.
Finding Hearings in Print
The Regenstein Library has a complete set of all published Congressional committee hearings. All hearings are published with a title indicating the name of the committee and date of the hearing. Once you have identified the title of a hearing using ProQuest Congressional, consult the Library catalog to get the call number and location.
Finding Hearings Online
ProQuest Congressional is the best place to start to identify and find Congressional hearings. It provides index information and abstracts, as well as direct access to the full text in PDF when available.
Keep in mind that the electronic text versions of hearings available through ProQuest Congressional, LexisNexis, and Westlaw may not include everything from the official printed version. In some instances you may be able to find hearing documents from recent hearings on the website of the Senate or House committee or subcommittee that held the hearing.
- ProQuest Congressional: Congressional Hearings (from 1824 in PDF, with index information)
- FDsys: Congressional Hearings (from 1995 in PDF and full text)
- HeinOnline: The U.S. Federal Legislative History Library includes the full text of hearings for some significant legislation. To search for hearings only, select "Advanced Search" and check congressionalhearings, househearings, and senatehearings.
- LexisNexis: Legal > Legislation & Politics - U.S. & U.K. > U.S. Congress > Committee Hearing Transcripts
- Selected transcripts from Federal News Service (August 1988 to date)
- Selected transcripts from CQ Transcriptions (January 1995 to date)
- Westlaw: USTESTIMONY & CONGTMY databases
- Selected transcripts from CQ Transcriptions (selected coverage from 1993 to 1996, full coverage from 1996)
- Selected transcripts from NewsRoom (from November 2004)
CRS Reports
The Library of Congress Congressional Research Service does research and writes report specifically for Congress. These reports are not normally distributed to depository libraries. A good overview of CRS and its reports is available from LLRX.
See also information from OpenCongress, focused on issues of public access to CRS reports.
- Proquest Congressional - Indexes many CRS reports. Includes full text from 2004 forward.
- OpenCRS.com - Center for Democracy & Technology - CRS reports available on the web.
- CRS Reports from University of North Texas Libraries - UNT provides access to CRS reports that were ever made available on the internet. Begins around 1990.
- Penny Hill Press - Penny Hill Press indexes and sells many CRS reports. They are catagorized under broad subjects like "terrorism" or "foreign aid." The reports are not available in full text on the internet from Penny Hill.
- CRS Reports by Topic from the Thurgood Marshall Law Library - CRS Reports by Topic from the Thurgood Marshall Law Library
- CRS reports via Google - This Google custom search engine searches only full text CRS reports available on the web. So, while this search won't find the listings of CRS reports on Penny Hill, it will find CRS reports that are in full text on the internet.
- CRS Reports on National Security & Military Issues - From Federation of American Scientists. The FAS links to many government publications, including CRS reports. This is a great site to use to find hard to find government reports.
- Write to your Representative or Senator - As a last resort, you can write to your Representative or Senator to request a copy of a current CRS report.
