Reading Government Document Number
All federal government agencies/departments are required to send copies of the documents they publish to the U.S. Superintendent of Documents. There they are assigned a SuDoc number, which begins with 1, 2 or 3 letters based on the publishing agency/department;
|
e.g. |
ED |
Dept. of Education. |
|
HE |
Dept. of Health |
|
|
J |
Dept. of Justice |
|
|
NAS |
||
|
PR |
President’s Office |
|
|
X |
Congress |
|
|
Y |
Congress |
and the letters are followed by numbers and often more letters, with all sorts of punctuation in the middle. The basic reference works/indexes used with U.S. Documents cite these numbers, so researchers can easily move from an index to the Government Documents shelves/drawers to find the document they need.
BEWARE:
The sorting of SuDoc numbers for shelving/filing is VERY DIFFERENT from the Library of Congress call number sorting. The basic rules for sorting SuDoc numbers are:
Alpha-numeric:Sort by alphabetical letters(s) first, then by numbers
The periods between 2 numbers are just dots; they are NOT decimal points.
|
CORRECT ORDER |
WRONG ORDER |
|
C 1.1:992 |
C 1.1:992 |
|
C 1.2:C 3 |
C 1.11:25 |
|
C 1.11:25 |
C 1.2:C 3 |
Order of punctuation
: Colons file before / or –
/ Slashes file before –
- Dashes file last
