Welcome to the CPSC's electronic reading room. Under the provisions of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Amendments of 1996, all federal agencies are required to use electronic information technology to foster public availability of FOIA records. The Act requires each agency to make electronically available the documents described in 5 U.S.C. Sec. 552(a)(2) that the agency created after November 1, 1996. CPSC's electronic FOIA records are images in portable document format (pdf). Thus, if you have not done so already, viewing these publications requires downloading Adobe(TM) Acrobat(TM) software. If your browser (such as Netscape or Internet Explorer) is compatible with Adobe Acrobat, you can set it up so that pdf documents are viewed automatically. Otherwise, you can download the document to your computer and use Adobe Acrobat to view it.

Please note: if you use the Acrobat 4.05 reader, sometimes you may get the message "Read less image data than expected" for certain older documents that were created with prior versions of Acrobat Exchange. You may be assured, however, that the entire document is there. However, if you use the Acrobat 5 Reader to view these older documents, they may only be partially viewable or not be viewable at all (can give blank pages). To view them, you can try one of two things. First, you can try changing a setting in Acrobat 5 Reader:

1. Start Acrobat 5.0 Reader
2. Choose Edit > Preferences > General
3. Select Options from the column on the left
4. Deselect the "Display PDF in Browser" option in Web Browser Options, and then click OK
5. Exit from the Acrobat 5.0 Reader

CPSC uses code numbers to identify all products under the jurisdiction of the Commission. Product codes are used for accident, injury, and death reports that come to the Commission through various means, including the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), which obtains data from a statistically representative sample of hospital emergency rooms. When browsing the FOIA section of CPSC's web site, all entries are further identified by their "product code" numbers, which appear inside parentheses on the title line. You may search for these codes, and the descriptions or titles of the records in the menus below, using the "Search" option.

For more information about obtaining publicly available records from CPSC, see our Guide to Public Information, in the "About CPSC" section of this web site.

A note about the year by which documents are categorized - the information presented in this section is classified by the fiscal year it was furnished to those wishing to have it. For example, a 1994 report requested during fiscal 1997 (from October 1, 1996 to September 30, 1997) would be categorized under 1997, but a 1993 document furnished in November 1997 would be categorized under 1998.