ProQuest® Congressional Help - How do I finding unbundled Serial Set documents?
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How do I find unbundled Serial Set documents?

Many of the larger publications in the Serial Set have multiple parts or span multiple Serial Set volumes. Since the House and Senate publication numbering system assigned a given publication only one number, no matter the size of the publication or how many parts or volumes it spans, many of the largest documents are extremely cumbersome to use.

For example, House Document 1006 from the 61st Congress (Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior for 1910) spans Serial Set volumes 5975-5978 and is composed of nearly 2,600 pages. Because of its size and variety of content (ranging from the Report of the Government Hospital for the Insane to the Report of the U.S. Geological Survey), it has been "unbundled" into 28 separate reports, each with its own bibliographic record and subject indexing.

In addition, the early State of the Union messages to Congress contained other documents, often from the Executive Branch, that were sent to Congress along with the message. This practice also created huge documents under one publication number that contained widely differing subject matter and content. These have also been "unbundled". In so doing, the relevancy and specificity of indexing for each document has been greatly increased, which gives the user more targeted and more granular search results.

Users can tell if documents have been "unbundled" if the publication number ends with a slash (/) and an additional number. The number before the slash is the "official" publication number; the number after the slash is the enclosure or part number.

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