LibGuides: Legal Studies: How-To: Work with Government Sources

General Tips for Using Government Sources

Realize that services often have their own terminology, jargon and abbreviations.
- Look for glossaries or dictionaries. Some sites will provide a definition when you hover over a word, others have a specific sub-page, or section at the bottom of a page.
Familiarize yourself with the structure of the site.
- Look for a site map, headings, subheadings and breadcrumbs.
Use advanced search whenever possible.
- If an advanced search option is not available, experiment in the standard search box with limiters, AND, OR or NOT, quotation marks etc.,
Not getting many results?
- Try 'zooming out''; think about your question from a broader perspective.
Getting too many results?
- Add a limiting factor to narrow your focus.
Minimize information overload
- Start with a general search term
- Read laterally

Utah Government

United States Federal Government

Gov Info
Provided by the government publishing office (GPO), this website provides free public access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
As the largest library in the world, the Library of Congress includes multiple unique digital collections.
United States Census Business Topics
The United States Census Business and Economics section includes statistics for over 27 million United States businesses including, activity, characteristics, and locations.
United States Bureau of Economic Indicators
Provides an overview of the U.S. economy nationally, regionally and by industry with excellent charts.
Cornell University Legal Information Institute
"Our work brings legal domain expertise together with emerging technologies to enhance and explain the law for the public. We identify, extract, annotate, index, and present features latent in the raw data provided by government publishers. We also create original content meant to explain and clarify the law, like Wex, our Supreme Court Bulletin Previews, and the case summaries in our Gender Justice Collection.

The output of all that expertise is the content found in the various collections available for free on this website. This page organizes that work into both the various projects we undertake and the collections of content we publish." --from https://about.law.cornell.edu/our-work/