 |
|
|
Home Page > Legislative
Branch > U.S. Congressional Serial Set
> Congressional Documents > About
Congressional Documents: About
Congressional documents originate from congressional committees and cover
a wide variety of topics and may include reports of executive departments
and independent organizations, reports of special investigations made
for Congress, and annual reports of non-governmental organizations. There
are three types of documents:
- House and Senate Documents: Contain various other
materials ordered printed by both chambers of Congress. Documents can
include reports of executive departments and agencies, some of which
are submitted in accordance with Federal law, then later are ordered
printed as documents. Sometimes committee prints are ordered printed
as documents also, if the information they contain is in demand. Documents
have a larger distribution than committee prints.
- Senate Executive Documents: Contain the text of a
Treaty as it is submitted to the U.S. Senate for ratification by the
President of the United States. Beginning with the 97th Congress in
1981, Executive Documents became known as Treaty Documents, and they
are now numbered instead of lettered alphabetically.
- Senate Treaty Documents: Contain the text of a Treaty
as it is submitted to the U.S. Senate for ratification by the President
of the United States. Numbered consecutively from the 1st Session through
the 2d Session of a Congress. Prior to the 97th Congress known as Executive
(Lettered) Documents, and identified by letters of the alphabet.
GPO Access contains selected House, Senate, and treaty documents
from the 104th Congress (1995-96) forward. Only the Congressional documents
that are printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) are included.
The database for the current Congress is updated irregularly, as electronic
versions of the documents become available. Reports are available as ASCII
text and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
|
