Library Research Guide for HIST 12X: The AIDS Epidemic

General Sources

Note the difference between government documents and government archives. Government documents are government publications intended for public viewing. Government archives are records accumulated in the course of government business and not originally intended for public viewing.

In response to the AIDS crisis: records of the National Commission on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, 1983-1994 includes briefing books, hearing and meeting transcripts, reports, and press clippings from the National Library of Medicine

Documents

Hathitrust is a huge general digital library similar to, and partly overlapping in content with, Google Books and Internet Archive but with some special features.  Hathitrust includes numerous government documents. 

• In Catalog Advanced Search, you can use a government department or agency name as author.
• In Full Text Advanced Search, you can use a government department or agency name as author, "Add another group of search fields", and add a Subject.

HathiTrust also offers:

• Separate full text search for HathiTrust government documents.  Narrow the results in the left hand column by Author: agency name, date, etc. 
• United States Federal Government Documents Registry, a catalog type search.  Not all included documents are full text in HathiTrust, try Internet Archive as well.

There are also many government documents in the Internet Archive.  There is an Internet Archive subcollection  GovDocs Government Documents which is itself full text searchable and which contains foreign, US, state and local documents.  This may not include all government documents in the Internet Archive.

Films

FedFlix contains over 8700 government films back to the 1940s.

Technical reports are used for the limited publication of technical information

National Technical Reports Library offers full text technical reports.

TRAIL: Technical Report Archive and Image Library (1906-1992 (bulk 1920-1959)) includes reports published by numerous government agencies containing descriptions of research performed for U.S. government agencies largely prior to 1975. TRAIL searches the metadata of government technical reports.  A selection of the reports is digitized and deposited for full text searching in HathiTrust and the University of North Texas Digital Library.

Archives

U. S. Declassified Documents Reference System Online contains declassified documents sent from various government agencies to the presidential libraries as well as presidential records.

Sources for the State Department, National Security Council, CIA and other agencies can be found at Library Research Guide for Foreign Relations

Congress

You can obtain full text hearings, committee reports, background papers (CRS reports) given to Congress people going into committee meetings and other material in;

ProQuest Congressional offers Congressional publications dating from 1790 to the present. Publications included are Committee Hearings, House and Senate Documents, House and Senate Reports, Senate Executive Reports, Senate Executive Treaty Documents, Legislative Histories, Serial Set Maps, Serial Set. More information from ProQuest. ProQuest has a Research Guide to Government Documents.

Presidential Documents

HeinOnline U.S. Presidential Library includes, among many other sources:

• Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Herbert Hoover to Barack Obama, 1929-2014);
• Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States (1789-1989)
• Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (Volumes 1-41, 1965-2005) and Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents (2005- )

More sources for presidential material can be found at Library Research Guide for Foreign Relations

Public Health Service

Public health reports (Title varies). Washington: U.S. Public Health Service
HOLLIS Record
--Several online sources

Also conveniently browsable and full, text searchable in HathiTrust (1896-1970)  (HathiTrust  (1900-2009) In Advanced Full Text search, put your search terms in the top box, then Title exact phrase, Public Health Reports, in the second:

Public Health Reports: Vols. 89 to 134; 1974 to 2019
Health Services Reports: Vols. 87 to 89; 1972 to 1974
HSMHA Health Reports: Vols. 86 to 87; 1971 to 1972
Public Health Reports: Vols. 11 to 85; 1896 to 1970
Weekly abstract of sanitary reports: Vols. 2 to 10; 1887 to 1895
Bulletin of Public Health: Vol. 1; 1878

PubMed Central has full text, but not all full text searchable.

Search Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report full text in JSTOR Advanced search, limiting by opening Health Policy in Journal Filter list, then checking Public Health Reports.

Communicable Disease Center

The CDC has digitized its publications.

Nationally Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS) weekly reports for the United States (1888-2013) have been digitized.