How to Effectively Locate Federal Information on the WWW:
Questions and Answers

I. Know the Structure to Find the Information

1. What section of the Constitution of the United States establishes the power of the Legislative Branch?
Answer:
Click on the link to the Constitution in the chart for the Government of the United States. This will lead you to the Library of Congress' searchable electronic version of the Constitution. Do a search using the term legislative branch. The answer is: Article I.
2. What is the WWW address of the United States Patent and Trademark Office?
Answer:
The WWW address is www.uspto.gov.
3. In which branch/department is the General Services Administration?
Answer:
Search the Federal Agency Web Sites (LSU) to determine that the General Services Administration is an Independent Agency
4. In which branch/department is the Government Printing Office?
Answer:
Search the Federal Agency Web Sites (LSU) to determine that the Government Printing Office is part of the Legislative Branch.
5. How can you obtain a current information on applying for National Science Foundation Grant?
Answer:
Search the Federal Agency Web Sites (LSU) to locate the National Science Foundation's Web site and go to the section on grants.
6. Bonus Question: What is the current population of the United States?
Answer:
First you need to determine what federal agency might generate this information -- the answer is the Census Bureau. Then go the Census Bureau's Homepage: www.census.gov. The Census Bureau maintains a "clock" of the current population on their page.

II. Using Search Engines and Subject Indexes to Locate Federal Information

1. Using Google can you find the text of President Bush's most recent Inaugural Address? Is there an easier or more exact way to retrieve it?
Answer:
Google is the easiest to find this information. Simply enter the keywords bush inaugural address and the site containing the information will be returned. However, a better way to find President Bush's most recent Inaugural Address would be to go directly to the White House. This would also guarantee an official version of the speech -- without mistakes -- and would knock out spoofs or parodies.
2. Using Infomine, Yahoo, and Federal Resources Organized by Topic, search for the subject human rights. What is the difference in coverage of each of the subject indexes?
Answer:
There is no right or wrong answer to this question. All of the indexes have human rights coverage -- Infomine includes CD-ROM titles and other "official" government sites. Yahoo is broader and pulls in non-government sources. Federal Resources Organized by Topic provides a nice coverage from various government agencies.
3. Can you find the current Consumer Price Index for San Diego using Yahoo and Infomine?
Answer:
Search Yahoo using the terms Consumer Price Index San Diego. This will direct you to a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) News Brief that contains the information. Search Infomine using the term Consumer Price Index. This will lead you to the BLS Homepage where you have to search further for the information.

III. Laws of the Land

Statutory Law

1. Were there any bills introduced in the current U. S. Congress that dealt with providing housing for the homeless?

Answer:
Search the text of bills through: Thomas or GPO Access

Answer: 2. On Thomas, bills by topic (110th Congress), how many bills are listed under "humanities"? Select one of these bills. Who sponsored the Senate version? Were there any co-sponsors? What is the bill number? What is the status?

Answer:
Search the text of bills through: Thomas

3. Was Santa Barbara mentioned in the 2007 Congressional Record?

Answer:
Congressional Record (Thomas)
GPO Access

4. Where can you find reference from a particular bill to the corresponding section of the Statutes at Large?

Answer:
GPO Access: Bring up the text of a bill to see the cross reference at the top.

Administrative Law

1. Are there any pending regulations on ferrets? Any other entries in the Federal Register about them?
Answer:
Federal Regulations are available from the Code of Federal Regulations via GPO Access .

2. How can you limit your search in the Federal Register to just regulations?

Answer:
Select the Federal Register from GPO Access; see the sections on the bottom of the advanced search page.

3. How do you cite from the Code of Federal Regulations?

Answer:
See Introduction to Basic Legal Citation on Cornell's Legal Information Institute site.

Case Law

1. In which court did the landmark case Brown vs. Board of Education begin?

Answer:
Cornell has an archive of the 300 most important Supreme Court cases: http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/search/search.html/
 

2. How many cases on capital punishment have made it to the Supreme Court since 1990?

Answer:
Check Cornell's list of current decisions; there is topical access to this database.

3. How many days in April 2007 did the Supreme Court hear arguments?

Answer:
The Supreme Court has a calendar on its site.

IV. Statistics, Demographics and other useful data

1. What was the population in 2000 for Santa Barbara County?

Answer:
Information from the 2000 Census is available at http://factfinder.census.gov/.

2. What is the latest level of the Consumer Price Index?

Answer:
The Consumer Price Index is available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://stats.bls.gov.

3. What resources are listed under "Business and Industry" at the University of Michigan? Under "Demographics"?

Answer:
University of Michigan statistics page: http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/stats.html.

4. How many men and women 35 and over were enrolled in colleges in 1970? In 1990? Projected for 2010?

Answer:
The National Center for Education Statistics has a digest: http://www.ed.gov/NCES/pubs/d96/subindx.htm. Go to: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/ for a list of publications and statistical data.

5. How many cases of sexually transmitted diseases were reported by state health departments in 1950? In 2000?

Answer:
Check the Centers for Disease Control site at: http://www.cdc.gov/DataStatistics/.

6. What percent of murder victims in 2006 were males?

Answer:
Refer to the 2006 crime statistics at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm#cius

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