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POLT 505 - American Congress (UNH Durham)

Resources to support projects for this course

Congress's Own Documentation of Its Actions

  • Search results can be filtered by Congress session, bill type, status of legislation, chamber of origin, committee, and more.
  • In the entry for a specific bill, you can view all actions under Actions, all summaries, bill-text versions, related bills, committees/subcommittees that were involved, and more
  • Actions page will provide links to any committee reports, relevant pages in the Congressional Record, and roll call results within the session.
  • Actions page will indicate whether Senate hearings were held and printed.

General Resources

Three Types of Resources

In general, there are three types of resources or sources of information: primary, secondary, and tertiary.  It is useful to understand these types and to know what type is appropriate for your coursework when searching for information.

It's sometimes difficult to distinguish among these three types and they do vary by discipline and subject.

  1. Primary sources are original materials on which other research is based; for example,
    • original works (written, spoken, recorded, visual) – poems, diaries, court records, interviews, surveys, polls, newsreel footage, newspaper articles about events, art works, statistical information, and original research/fieldwork
    • original research published in scholarly/academic journals
    • For this class, primary sources include publications that record the official actions of the committees and the members of Congress
  2. Secondary sources are those that describe, critique, or analyze primary sources; for example:
    • books and articles that interpret, review, or synthesize original research/fieldwork
    • review articles in the sciences and social sciences
    • For this class, secondary sources will provide accounts and analyses of the actions or actors in Congress; for example, news articles
  3. Tertiary sources are those used to organize and locate secondary and primary sources. Can also be compilations or highly distilled summaries that offer factual representation rather than viewpoints or critiques. Examples include indexes, abstracts, databases, and some reference materials.