Government Documents and Information  

The best way to find government documents at Acadia is to use the

Advanced Catalogue Search.

Including Canada or Nova Scotia (or another jurisdiction) in the author field helps to limit your search to government documents.  If you know the government department, such as Canada. Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans, you can use that as an author or in word(s) anywhere.  Government departments may have changed names over the years and items will appear under the name used at the time of publication. 

Acadia is a full depository for publications of the Canadian and Nova Scotian governments and receives a number of items in print. 

Most of the documents we receive are listed in the Vaughan Library Catalogue and are shelved with our circulating or reference collections.  Exceptions presently include debates, statutes, statistics, pamphlets or older documents, which are still found in separate government documents collections on Level 4.  The catalogue may give their location as FEDGOV or STATS, where they are arranged by a government classification number.  The GOVDOC collection contains Nova Scotia debates and statutes. If you need assistance in identifying what we have or where it is located, please contact Patricia Gallant or talk to staff members at the Access or Reference desks.

Many government publications are also freely available online. While we have added links to the library catalogue for a number of these, there is far more being published than we are able to document.  We strongly encourage researchers to check one of the government catalogues and search tools listed in this guide or simply to search the internet.  Limiting a search to a government body can often be done by specifying a domain like .gc.ca or .gov.ns.ca in the search engine's advanced search options.