Military, naval, aerospace, and veterans studies: Related disciplines, policy research, US government information

What's on this page?

Many disciplines can approach the same question or problem, bringing their own orientations, approaches, and jargon. This page provides shortcuts to a selection of the major resources to access their literatures, with special attention to sources offering primary sources and analyses of international and domestic policies.  It also points to library tools for learning languages.

Think tanks, policy papers, "gray literature"

Professors and other people with advanced academic degrees present their expertise in other settings beside peer-reviewed journals and scholarly books.  They may produce reports and analyses for governments, non-profit organizations, corporations, and all sorts of research institutes; they also distribute research for comment at academic conferences.  While these sources are often created with academic rigor, they commonly do not go through full peer review before publication.  Nonetheless, especially regarding recent events and hot topics in politics and policy, such "gray literature" can be important bridges between journalism and traditional academic publications. 

Social sciences and history

Engineering

Language learning systems

If you want to learn on the go or don't want to depend on internet access, the Virginia Tech Libraries have a large collection of language learning compact disks on the 5th floor of Newman Library that you can check out. These links will show you their call numbers and check-out status.

Many public libraries offer entry-level online language-learning tools like Mango Languages, Rocket Languages, and/or Babbel (among others) to residents with appropriate library cards.  (Virginia Tech students qualify for cards at  the Blacksburg library and other branches of the Montgomery-Floyd Regional Library District [MFRL] no matter where their homes are.)

Check with your local and/or hometown public library about resources it makes available to its members.

US federal government information sources

By law, the US Government Publishing Office is the "official, digital, and secure source for producing, protecting, preserving, and distributing the official publications and information products of the federal government," making it the world's largest publisher.  Government "documents"  range from tourist brochures to long books, speeches to astronomical data, gardening advice to technical reports, budget reports to the laws of the land. 

Most GPO publications have been published online since the late 1990s and are listed in our library's Discovery Search (Primo) catalog: GPO has had an online-only publication policy since the early 2020s.  

Extensive digitization of older documents (including many outside GPO's mandate) has been done by government agencies, by commercial database vendors (Voxgov, HeinOnline, ProQuest, Readex), and by nonprofits (LLMC-Digital, HathiTrust, Internet Archive); see entries for their collections elsewhere in this guide or in the libraries Databases A-Z directory.

The library's physical "Docs" collection is in a special section on the 5th floor of Newman library, identified and stored according to GPO's unique "SuDoc" call number system; you can find them in our <em>Discovery Search</em>  catalog.  Many printed government publications, dating to the early 20th century, are in offsite storage. (Plus some federal publication series are cataloged using the more familiar Library of Congress call numbers and shelved in the main collection.)  Don't be reluctant to ask a librarian for help.

Understanding the SuDoc number is crucial for getting your hands on physical government publications in the library.  William & Mary has a good guide to How to read a SuDoc number

Accurate SuDuc numbers are necessary for requesting delivery from library storage or from other libraries via ILLiad.  You can find SuDoc numbers in:

For earlier SuDoc numbers, it is often faster and easier to use the print indexes to the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications, 1895-2004, shelved near the Docs stacks (start at call no Z1223 .A183) than to fight with the online PDF indexes of  US government documents from GPO.

Surveys of US Military/Defense Information Sources