Government Documents in Special Collections

My name is Jake Hargis, and during the Fall 2022 semester, I worked as a Library Scholarly Intern with Special Collections. The overarching project that I worked on during the semester was to create a research guide for locating government documents within Special Collections. 

I started my internship with little knowledge about the inner workings of a library, let alone the Special Collections/archive of a university library, so I knew I had my work cut out for me. 

To first understand what I would be compiling, I was tasked with studying SuDoc Classification, or the Superintendent of Documents Classification System. This system is how federal, state, and local government documents are classified and organized within Cal Poly Humboldt Special Collections. Listed towards the bottom of the page are links to SuDoc classification guides.

After studying and applying the SuDoc Classification in a practical setting, I moved on to compile a list of government documents within the Special Collections space in the Cal Poly Humboldt Library. To do this, I created a spreadsheet that contains the search terms, filters, and the number of documents I found while searching on the Library's online database.