Congressional Help: The Congressional Record Bound Edition and Predecessors

Please note: the content viewed in ProQuest^® Congressional varies according to the subscriptions/purchases of individual institutions.

The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings, debates, and activities of Congress. Although the Record contains a substantially verbatim account of the proceedings and debate, it also contains extensive inserted materials, communications from the President and executive agencies, memorials, and petitions.

Daily and Bound Editions: There are two editions of the Record, a daily edition and a bound, permanent edition. The daily edition reports each day’s proceedings in Congress and is published on the succeeding day. Periodically, throughout a session, an index to the daily Record is published. At the end of each session of Congress, all of the daily editions are collected, re-paginated, and re-indexed into a permanent, bound edition. The bound edition usually takes several years to be published after a Congressional session ends. The bound edition is made up of one volume per session of Congress, with each volume published in multiple parts.

The primary ways in which the bound edition differs from the daily edition are:

• continuous pagination;
• somewhat edited, revised and rearranged text; and
• the dropping of the prefixes H, S, and E before page numbers

Due to the repagination process, a citation in the daily Record does not work with the bound Record, nor does the reverse work.

Use the following links for additional information:

The Advanced Search form allows you to search on specific segments of a document. The search segments below apply to the Congressional Record Permanent Digital Collection.

From the Search by Number pages, the following search options may be used:

• Bill number
• Public Law number
• Statute at Large citation
• Congressional Record Citations page (for the permanent Bound Congressional Record)
• Congressional Record Daily Citations page  (for the Daily Congressional Record)

The Congressional Record Bound Edition and Predecessors is a part of the Congressional Record Permanent Digital Collection.

The bound Congressional Record currently consists of four sections:

• House Proceedings
• Senate Proceedings
• Extensions of Remarks
• the Daily Digest (since 1947)

The Proceedings and Extensions of Remarks for each day are bound in chronological sequence, with Extensions of Remarks following the Proceedings for each Chamber. The final volumes of the bound Record of each session are one or more index volumes containing a history of bills and a single volume contain all Daily Digest content for the session.

The metadata in the ProQuest Congressional RecordBound Edition and Predecessors contains:

• Bibliographic metadata at the top of each page including pages for the House and Senate each day, a permalink back to the proceedings from that day and congress-session number.
• Links to results records for previous and subsequent days
• Links to congressional committee hearings held on the same day
• Members of Congress, with associated subjects and page numbers and links to the Biographical Directory of the Untied States Congress
• Other Speakers and Subjects, with CIS index terms, associated subjects and speakers, and page numbers
• Roll Call votes, with associated subjects and page numbers
• Bills and resolutions with bill numbers and associated bill numbers, brief descriptions, and page numbers
• Searchable PDF replica of the original, available in its entirety and also in 50-page chunks in cases where the PDF is more than 50 pages long  and the Daily Digest

Note:  not all of these elements occur each day/index record.