Urban affairs & planning: Government, nonprofits, think tanks

Urban Affairs & Planning at Virginia Tech conducts basic and applied research on national and international development patterns, focusing on key forces shaping metropolitan growth such as demographics, environment, technology, design, and transportation.

What's on this page

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. 

Most GPO publications have been published online since the late 1990s and are listed in our library's Discovery Search (Primo) catalog. For most of a century, Virginia Tech automatically received most GPO output in print "docs," identified by GPO's unique "SuDoc" call number system ... but didn't catalog most of them.

The SuDoc number is crucial for getting your hands on physical government publications in the library (Newman Library 5th floor), from library storage, or via ILLiad.  Most of our printed  federal publications are arranged by SuDoc number on the 5th floor of Newman Library. Don't be reluctant to ask a librarian for help.

Extensive digitization of older documents has been done by government agencies, by commercial database vendors (Voxgov, HeinOnline, ProQuest, Readex), and by nonprofits (LLMC-Digital, HathiTrust, Internet Archive).  Many of those digitized documents remain invisible to Discovery Search but can be located and read on those prodivers platforms.  (See the library's Databases A-Z directory.  

Records in the GPO catalog and Voxgov databases should provide SuDoc class numbers back to the 1970s-80s. For earlier SuDoc numbers, GovInfo.gov provides PDF indexes of  US government documents, notably the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications, 1895-2004. Those PDFs are cumbersome to work with; you might might find it faster to use the print indexes shelved near the Docs stacks (start at call no Z1223 .A183) to find citation and SuDoc information to request documents from VT storage or ILLiad.

US state governance information sources

Acquiring records under state open records/open meetings laws

State laws vary from one another and from the federal Freedom of Information Act.  The following guides have different strengths; compare their coverage before requesting a state or local record.

  • Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Open Government Guide provides detailed descriptions of the coverage of each state's law.
  • National Freedom of Information Coalition (University of Missouri) State Freedom of Information Laws includes sample request letters and summarizes resources for all US states.

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. 

Preprints, conference proceedings

Intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations

Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and private, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) often partner to address social, environmental, economic, technical, and human rights issues.  For research on topics on transnational and international concern, it is often appropriate to search both kinds of entities, using the same search terms.

IGO Custom Search Engine

The IGO Custom Search Engine searches across hundreds of IGO websites, including the United Nations, World Bank, UN Development Program (UNDP), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), European Union, the Asian Development Bank, and many others.

NGO Custom Search Engine

Like its IGO counterpart, use the NGO Custom Search Engine search across hundreds of NGO websites worldwide.


These Google Custom Search Engines (CSE) are a project of the International Documents Taskforce (IDTF) of the American Library Association (ALA). For more background on this project, including links to the IGo and NGO lists included in these searches, please see the IDTF wiki.

Find out about nonprofits