Guides & Bibliographies

GPO Monthly Catalog

Introduction

GPO Monthly Catalog covers all types of U.S. Government documents, including Congressional reports, hearings, debates, and records; judiciary materials; and documents issued by executive departments (Defense, State, Labor, Office of the President, etc.). Each of the more than 522,000 records include a complete bibliographic citation including subject headings. GPO stands for the Government Printing Office, and this online version of the Monthly Catalog covers 1976 to present.

GPO Monthly Catalog is available to current UT Arlington Faculty, and UT Arlington Students on the web at this addresses:

eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/fs-gpo.cgi

Searching

A truncation symbol in GPO Monthly Catalog to add plurals is a plus sign (+), and when this symbol is put at the end of a root word, the database will be searched for both the singular and the plural form of that word. For example, the command "girl+" will have the computer search engine look for both "girl" or "girls."

A phrase is indicated with quotation marks ("") so that words that are surrounded by quotation marks are searched as a single string. For example, "child welfare" will be searched as a two word phrase.

Two Boolean operators that are important in finding information are AND and OR. The AND is used to connect two different concepts and the OR is used between concepts that are synonymous. It is critical to put parentheses around a search expression that contains an OR. Here is an example:

(women+ or woman+ or girl+ or famale+) AND (contraception or "birth control")

The first part of this statement will find material about females. The second part will look for the words "contraception" or "birth control". The AND then links the first set with the second. This should be an effective way to look for contraceptive issues facing women.

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