Home Page > Legislative Branch > House Journal > Search Tips

House Journal: Search Tips

Retrieve a section | Identification Codes | Sample Searches

The House Journal is the official record of proceedings of each legislative day in the House of Representatives, U.S. Congress. It can include material such as corrections to the Congressional Record, when members have unanimously decided to expunge remarks or extraneous matter from the permanent edition of the Record. Certified copies of the House Journal are admissible in judicial proceedings (28 USC Sec. 1736). Publication of the Journal is required by the Constitution, except when the proceedings may require secrecy. The print version is published and distributed at the close of each session of Congress.

GPO Access contains the House Journal from the 102^nd (1991-92) to the 105^th (1997-1998) Congresses, with the exception of 1997 and one section each from 1991, 1993, and 1996. The database is updated irregularly as the House provides information to the Government Printing Office. Documents are available as ASCII text and Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

For more information about the House Journal and related House publications, search or browse Deschler's Precedents of the United States House of Representatives.

Retrieve an entire House Journal section

The retrieve a section feature allows you to view most sections from the House Journal for any year listed in the table of sections (1991-8, no 1997). The table displays the years for which a particular section is available. Simply choose a section and click on the corresponding year to open the entire section. Entire sections are available in ASCII text format only.

Identification Codes

In the list that displays your query results, each House Journal document is identified by two elements: a part number (1 or 2) and an issue number. For example, in the listing "[1998 House Journal--Part 1] MONDAY, JULY 20, 1998 (70)," "Part 1" signifies that this day's proceedings are found in Part 1 of the 1998 House Journal, "MONDAY, JULY 20, 1998" is the date of the issue, and "(70)" is the corresponding issue number.

Sample Searches (4)

The following sample searches are provided as guides to general types of searches in the House Journal. Unless otherwise indicated, they are performed in the 1998 database of the House Journal. For the sake of space, only the top three hits in each results list are included with each example below.

Note: The sample searches performed here are the same as those done in the Congressional Record database. This was done to further illustrate the connection between the two databases. Click here to view the Sample Searches performed in the Congressional Record database.

Subject | Congressperson's Name
Bill Number | Page Number

This type of search returns documents that are related to a specific subject. The word(s) that you enter as your search term(s) may appear anywhere within the document. This is also a method for checking roll-call votes. You can enter your key terms and "yeas" or "nays", or you can simply pull up a document for a particular date and skim through the issue to see if a particular topic was voted on.

This type of search returns documents based on a Congressperson’s name. To make your search more specific, modify the query by also including a date, field, or subject.

As in a general subject search, the name(s) that you enter as your search term(s) may appear anywhere within the document. The results list does not differentiate among documents in which the Congressperson is speaking and those in which s/he is spoken of. After you retrieve a document, you can tell that s/he is speaking if her/his name is written in all capital letters and aligned to the left of the page. (Performing a "find" search with your browser will allow you to make this determination more quickly and easily than reading through the text.)

Note: In the House Journal, as in the Congressional Record, a Congressperson is identified as Mr., Mrs., or Ms., not as Representative.

This type of search returns documents based on a given bill number. The bill number may be typed with or without punctuation. If no punctuation is used, you must leave a space between the "h" and the "r" for House bills.

This type of search returns documents that appear wholly or partially on a specified page. You must include the word "page" in your query in order to eliminate the return of documents that include the page number as a numeric reference within the text.

If additional pages are needed, you can simply go back and conduct a new search.

A service of the U.S. Government Printing Office.

Last updated: April 2, 2004
Page Name: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/hjournal/tips.html