Universal Access
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 most popular physical "Docs" are 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 catalog. Understanding the SuDoc number is crucial for locating physical government publications in the library.
The University of Montana has a good SuDoc Basics libguide. See also this University of Minnesota SuDoc Tutorial on YouTube. Don't be reluctant to ask a librarian for help.
Accurate SuDuc numbers are necessary for requesting delivery from library storage or from other libraries via ILLiad. You can find SuDoc numbers in:
Few libraries cataloged federal documents before the late 1970s; to locate 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.
