Jenkins On Your Desktop: Congressional Hearings on ProQuest Congressional

ProQuest Congressional is Jenkins' go-to source for U.S. legislative materials, including Hearings, House and Senate Documents, House and Senate Reports, and more.

Hearings are meetings of the House, Senate, or a committee to discuss proposed legislation, research, data, investigations, or government activities. Congressional hearing documents may record testimony from members of Congress, the Executive branch, experts, interest groups, and the general public.

Jenkins' ProQuest Congressional subscription includes PDFs of published hearings 2004-present, HTML text of selected hearings 1995-present, and index coverage for all hearings 1824-present. ProQuest also indexes recent hearings that are not yet published. Jenkins also has microfiche coverage in the library for 1970-2010.

To search the hearings on ProQuest Congressional, use your last name and member number to log into Jenkins' website. From the Member Center, select ProQuest Congressional.

To search all available hearings on ProQuest, select "Advanced Search" from the left-hand "Search Types" menu. The default search field is "All fields except full text", but this can be changed to "All fields including full text", "Subject", "Title", "Witness Affiliation", or "Witness". To only search the hearings, change the "Limit to" option to only "Hearings". A search can further be restricted by date or session of Congress.

If you already know the Sudoc number or CIS number, use the "Search By Number" option from the "Search Types" menu. From the "Bibliographic Citations" section, use the "Bibliographic Number: Sudoc" if you have a Sudoc number and use "Bibliographic Number: Accession No." if you have a CIS number. Be sure to follow the format of the example and make sure to eliminate all spaces from the numbers.

For more search tips, including how to use Boolean Operators, see the Search Syntax tab of the ProQuest Congressional LibGuide.

For additional training and hands-on experience searching ProQuest Congressional, register for the Jenkins Law Library: On Your Desktop CLE class. The class also covers other membership databases like HeinOnline and NewsBank.

ProQuest Congressional is a membership database available to all Jenkins members.