Skip to Main Content

Guide to Government Documents Research

A guide to help people access government documents, such as statutes, Presidential executive orders, Congressional hearings and committee reports, and federal agency publications.

Federal Agency Publications in the Research Library Catalog

The State of Arizona Research Library has been a federal depository library for over 100 years. We have a vast collection of federal publications. Our recommended starting place for searching our federal publication holdings is our Research Library Catalog.

The search bar is along the top of the page. To search our physical holdings and many of our digital collections, you can enter a search term in the search bar. Here are some search tips:

  • Put quotations around a phrase if you'd like to find an exact phrase match.
  • To see only Federal Documents in your search results, you can click on the left side bar to limit to only items in the Federal Documents collection.
  • If you see a blue URL under an item's title, you can click on that to go directly to the digital resource.
  • Clicking on the title of an item will show you more information about that item, including author, publication date, and how many copies the library has available.

If you find a physical item in our collection that you'd like to view, you can make an appointment to visit our Reading Room by completing our online Ask a Question form. If you are not located near downtown Phoenix, please check with your local public library to see if they are able to request the item for you using Interlibrary Loan.

If you are having trouble locating a federal publication, please let us know by completing our online Ask a Question form. We may have it in our collection. There are federal publications that are not yet listed in our catalog, but we can consult our card catalog to see if we have holdings for the item.