NEWS

ProQuest Creates the First Complete, Digital Trove
of Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations

Research quality improves as access to key pieces
in understanding U.S. history is simplified

ProQuest is enabling researchers to access a critical missing piece for understanding historic events with a first-ever complete, digital collection of Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations. When complete, the collection will encompass more than 79,000 executive orders, proclamations, directives and policy statements by American presidents from Washington to Obama, bringing together disparate content and making it easy to discover and work with. ProQuest Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations is part of and can be searched along with ProQuest’s renowned and growing collection of U.S. government content, assembled within a technology architecture that improves research outcomes.

Look at content samples for ProQuest Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations here: http://bit.ly/PQexecorders

Holding the force of law, executive orders and proclamations have played a role in a range of historic events – Native American removal, slave emancipation, internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, desegregation of the military – and provide important insight to presidential domestic and foreign policies. Until now, access to these documents by librarians and researchers has been challenging: many historic executive orders, especially those prior to 1935, are unnumbered, difficult to identify and locate online or elsewhere.

“ProQuest Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations helps researchers find and understand the impact of the actions taken by past and current Presidents of the U.S.,” said Susan Bokern, ProQuest vice-president, Information Solutions. “When searched together with our deep congressional and other executive branch content, researchers will have a better understanding of the roles and authorities of the executive and legislative branches of government. This primary source content is especially relevant today as we seek to understand how these authorities were executed by different Presidents throughout U.S. history.”

ProQuest’s team of government content experts worked in conjunction with archivists at the National Archives and Records Administration, Library of Congress, as well as federal agencies and academic libraries throughout the U.S. to assemble the world’s most comprehensive digital collection, including published documents, and hard-to-find handwritten manuscripts. They assembled the content document-by-document, enriching it with metadata and indexing that makes it easy to identify, locate and organise.

ProQuest Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations:

• Assembles both unnumbered and numbered documents online in one place

• Includes extensive and unique metadata for all documents, allowing researchers to easily and quickly locate specific orders by presidential administration, subject, agency, and/or document number

• Is cross-searchable with all of ProQuest’s congressional and executive branch document collections

ProQuest is a global leader in digitising historical and aggregating peer-reviewed scholarly content across disciplines, with an unrivaled repository of knowledge that dates from the 1400s. Through its information solutions and technological infrastructure, ProQuest provides researchers with the simple, intuitive search and access of massive deep-web databases of statistics, scholarly journals, ebooks, news content, reports and working papers, government and historical documents, streamlining steps and improving outcomes.

www.proquest.com