Publications of the U.S. Government (Record Group 287)

Record Group 287 in the Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States.

This record group is a collection of selected publications of U. S. Government agencies, arranged by the classification system ("SuDoc System") devised by the Office of the Superintendent of Documents at the Government Printing Office (GPO).

These publications are available to researchers at many of the 1,400 Congressionally designated depository libraries throughout the United States of the Federal Depository Library Program. Find a Federal Depository Library near you.

The core of the collection is a library begun in 1895 by GPO's Public Documents Division, and by 1972, when the National Archives acquired the library, it included official publications dating from the early years of the Federal Government and selected publications produced for and by Federal Government agencies.

The collection has been augmented since 1972 with accessions of multiyear blocks of U.S. Government publications, selected by the Office of the Superintendent of Documents as a by-product of its monthly cataloguing activity. The collection is estimated at 34,000 cubic feet. Only about one-half to two-thirds of all U.S. Government publications are represented in this collection.

Note: Publications of the committees of Congress (SuDoc classification Y4) through 1979 are available at the Center for Legislative Archives. The rest of the Record Group 287 collection is available at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Many publications are also available through GPO's govinfo, which provides free online access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government. govinfo replaced its predecessor, GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys), in December 2018.