Catalog of U.S. Government Publications  Tags: government_documents  

The Catalog of U.S. Government Publications has changed identities many times in its illustrious past.

You may hear it called the Monthly Catalog, which was its name prior to 2000.

It also houses the bibliographic information for a few different catalogs (including the Congressional Serial Set).

No matter the title, the CGP is a fantastic resource for government documents.

Use IM to chat with staff at the Research & Information Desk. For information about how to visit us, phone us, or email us, visit the Ask Us! page.

The CGP has six different catalogs to search individually or all at once. 

• Congressional Serial Set: Search the House and Senate Reports, House and Senate Documents, Senate Executive Reports and Documents and Senate Treaty Documents. Records in the CGP for the Congressional Serial Set date back to July 1976, but the set is complete from 1977-78 (95th Congress) up to the present. Many of these documents are available online.
• Congressional Publications - Search the publications of the United States Congress, The House of Representatives and the Senate from 1976 until the present. Many of these documents are available online.
• GPO Access Publications - This catalog will give you access to all the items on the GPO Access website. Many of these publications are from the Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches and date from 1994 to present.
• Internet Publications - Allows you to search only items available online. The records begin in July 1976.
• Periodicals - By using this catalog, you search only series that are printed three or more times annually by the U.S. Government.
• Serials - Conversely, this catalog will search series that are printed two times or less annually by  the U.S. Government. For example, annual reports would  be found in this catalog.

For more on these separate catalogs, see the CGP's Help Page.

There are two prior versions of the CGP: The Monthly Catalog of the United States Historical Set (1895-1976) and the GPO Monthly Catalog (1976 - Present).

• The Historical Set comes in dictionary form and can be found in the Government Documents Reference Stacks with the SuDoc Number: GP 3.8: yr. Released annually from 1895-1976, they are only available in paper format. 

• The GPO Monthly Catalog contains the same records as the CGP, but can only be accessed by BGSU and OhioLink users. The prime difference between the GPO Monthly Catalog and the CGP is the interface and tools available. Also, the GPO Monthly Catalog will allow you to instantly search OhioLink libraries for the document in question.

When you are searching the CGP, did you ever wonder what the search engine is using to accumulate your result list?

While it may seem like it, the CGP does NOT use full text search to retrieve documents. Instead it uses each document's MARC record. But what's a MARC record?

In the most basic of definitions, a MARC record is a text description of the document it is attached to. It contains the title, author, subject headings, etc., for each and every document in the catalog. Because the MARC record is short compared to many of the lengthy documents in the catalog, searching this way allows the catalog to be quick and efficient in every search it completes.

If you'd like to see what a MARC record looks like, click on the title of one of the items in your results list. The link will take you to that item's MARC record.