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Bound Congressional Record: Search TipsRetrieve a Bound Congressional Record Page Retrieve a Bound Congressional Record PageIf you know the year/volume and page number of the Congressional Record document that you want to retrieve, you may bypass the traditional method of searching by using the specialized Retrieve a Bound Congressional Record Page feature. First, select the year/volume by clicking on the corresponding radio button. Only one year/volume may be accessed in a single retrieval; the default is the current year/volume. Next, type the page number you wish to retrieve in the appropriate box. Finally, click on the "submit" button. Pages are available as PDF files only.
Sample Searches (6)The following sample searches are provided as guides to popular types of searches in the Congressional Record databases. Subject | Congressperson's Name | Bill Number | Roll Call Vote | Page Number | Date 1. Search by SubjectThis 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.
2. Search by Member of Congress' NameThis type of search returns documents based on a Member of Congress' name. To make your search more specific, modify the query by also including a date 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 Member of Congress is speaking and those in which she or he is spoken of. After you retrieve a document, you can tell that she or he is speaking if her or 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 Bound Congressional Record, a Member of Congress is identified as Mr., Mrs., or Ms., not as Senator or Representative. 3. Search by Bill NumberThis 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 bills in the House.
The order of returned documents is determined by relevance ranking, not by chronology; this ranking accounts for the appearance of a Bound Congressional Record document from April 10, 1999, in between two documents from March 23 and March 18, 1999. 4. Search by Roll Call VoteThis type of search returns documents that contain roll call votes. If you know the number of the specific roll call vote in which you are interested, you may search for it with a query such as "rollcall vote no 131". The search below illustrates how to search generally for roll call votes related to a subject.
5. Search by Page NumberThis 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.
For documents that span more than one page, it is possible to find the full page range by consulting the heading in an ASCII text file or the "Go To Page" tool in the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Page breaks are indicated by separators (e.g., [Page 7320-7321]) in an ASCII text file or by a new page view in the Adobe Acrobat Reader; they may, as in a printed document, fall in the middle of a sentence.
This type of search returns only documents that appear on a single, specific day of the Bound Congressional Record. To conduct this type of search, you must enter a query in the search box that looks like this: brDDmoYY, where "DD" is the date, "mo" is the month abbreviation, and "YY" is the year of the volume you want to find documents from. For example, br21ap99 will return only documents that were recorded on April 21 in the 1999 Bound Congressional Record. Remember that the maximum results is set at 50 by default. To return as many documents as possible from a specific day of the Bound Congressional Record, you may want to increase the maximum number or results using the drop-down menu beneath the search box. Identification CodesIn the list that displays your query results, the title of each Bound Congressional Record document is preceded by an identification code. The identification code contains three elements: a database abbreviation, the date of the Bound Congressional Record in which the result appears, and the first number of the page of the Bound Congressional Record on which the result appears. For example, in the identification code "br22ap997," "br" stands for Bound Congressional Record, "22ap99" is the issue date (April 22, 1999), and "7" appears because the document is found on page 7321 of the Bound Record.
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