ProQuest Creates the First Complete, Digital Trove of Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations
ANN ARBOR, MI, November 20, 2014 – 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 organize.
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 digitizing 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.
About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)
ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company’s products are a gateway to the world’s knowledge including dissertations, governmental and cultural archives, news, historical collections and ebooks. ProQuest technologies serve users across the critical points in research, helping them discover, access, share, create and manage information.
The company’s cloud-based technologies offer flexible solutions for librarians, students and researchers through the ProQuest®, Bowker®, Dialog®, ebrary®, EBL® and Serials Solutions® businesses – and notable research tools such as the Summon® discovery service, the RefWorks® Flow™ collaboration platform, the Pivot™ research development tool and the Intota™ library services platform. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.