From the earliest points in the history of the United States, government information was made publicly available to serve a variety of purposes including providing public educational information, basic information on the status of the republic, and a certain degree of operational transparency. The earliest material publicly distributed included a series called the "Serial Set". The Serial Set contained reports of governmental actions and operations, reports made to the executive branch and to Congress. Primarily these were shared with learned societies, museums and later with schools and libraries. In the early 1900s a more formal government information distribution plan was established via the U.S. Government Printing Office to distribute things published on behalf of the federal government to "regional" and "selective" depository libraries. NAU joined that program in 1937, but has a deep collection dating with some material dating to the late 1800s.
Some government documents can be considered as primary source materials, as they are created by agencies (and authors) with first-hand knowledge of specific events, or because they contain witness testimony (as in Congressional Hearings), or original data.
The physical U.S. Documents Collection is arranged using the Superintendent of Documents Classification system (SuDocs) - which arranges materials by the agency of origin (U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National forests, Department of Defense, Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, etc.) and respective call numbers reflect that agency association. The SuDocs call numbers while sort of looking like the Library of Congress system used in the rest of the library, mean different things and contain different information.
The primary tool to access U.S. and Arizona States Documents (located on the SE corner of the first floor) is the Primo library catalog. Most federal publications held by the library will be found there.
There are however a number of valuable online databases of (especially current) government information researchers need to be aware of:
Catalog of United States Government Publications (CGP)- The Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) is the finding tool for electronic and print publications from the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the U.S. government. These publications make up the National Bibliography of U.S. Government Publications. The CGP contains descriptive records for historical and current publications and provides direct links to those that are available online.
USA.Gov- a searchable database of government documents and data.
Other Important Government Document Series: