Social Sciences

Locating individual official publications in our collection is complex. Catalogue records for some official publications can be found using our interim catalogue. If you can’t find the document you need, please ask our Reference team for help. 

Historically, official publications were often issued in series and catalogued at the level of the series and not at the level of an individual document. In these cases, to identify a document in our print and microform collections, you will have to find its series and number within the series using a range of in-house and published guides, indexes and bibliographies before consulting the catalogue to find its shelfmark. 

When searching for official historic publications, the first step is to find out how they were organised in a particular country. To do this, consult a general guide, such as: 

• Guide to Official Publications of Foreign Countries, ed. by Gloria Westfall, 2nd edn (Chicago: American Library Association, 1997). BL Shelfmark OPL 070.595 
• Information Sources in Official Publications, ed. by Valerie J Nurcombe (London: Bowker-Saur, 1997). BL Shelfmark OPL 070.595. 
• Official Publications of Western Europe, ed. by Eve Johansson (London: Mansell, 1988).   BL Shelfmark OPL 940.043. 

We also hold a range of published guides to the official publications of individual countries and international organisations in the reference collection in the Social Sciences Reading Room. Some of the print versions have been annotated with British Library shelfmarks. Please ask our Reference team to advise. 

You can also consult the annotated version of the British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books held in the Reading Room under the name of the country. For each country, official publications are organised under form headings such as Constitutions, Laws, Legislative Bodies. This means you can locate the series and its shelfmark without knowing the title in the original language. 

To supplement the print resources, we have created a series of PDF guides to foreign official publications. These identify the main print series and their shelfmarks, printed indexes, and locations of free online versions: 

• Parliamentary Proceedings (PDF, 0.2mb) 

• Parliamentary Papers (PDF, 0.1mb) 

• Primary Legislation (PDF, 0.1mb) 

• Subordinate Legislation (PDF, 0.2mb) 

• Service list - Army & Navy (PDF, 0.3mb) 

• Electoral Registers and their uses (PDF, 0.4mb) 

• Tracing living people (PDF, 0.1mb) 

• Guide to current Asian official publications (PDF, 0.4mb) 

• United States Government Publications (PDF, 0.4mb) 

• Australian and New Zealand publications (PDF, 0.2mb) 

• African official publications (PDF, 0.4mb) 

We also have indexes to different types of printed official documents, including: 

• A card index to official gazettes, arranged by country name 

• A card index to parliamentary debates, arranged by country name 

• Published bibliographies, often annotated with Library shelfmarks. 

The majority of the foreign government publications collection is held at our Boston Spa site in Yorkshire and advance ordering is required.