United States Masterfile Content
Your one-stop resource for American public and political documents from 1774 to the present day.
Exploration of U.S. federal information is challenging, even for the trained practitioner.
United States Masterfile comprises a patchwork of finding aids developed over two centuries—from the work of Ames, Poore, and Hickcox; to what became the Congressional Record; to the Library of Congress cataloguing of GPO records in 1976. USM is designed to merge and integrate these disparate historical and contemporary bibliographic materials into a single query structure.
The example here is from William Maclay's Journal during the Continental Congress in Philadelphia:
Expanded Content
Direct Links
Paratext improved search algorithms ‘dig deeper’ into a variety of Open Access (OA) repositories, offering in many cases, more useful and discrete links from historical finding aids, than the parameters of the repository's own search structure. USM data includes links to HathiTrust, the American Memory Project, the National Archives, and Google Books.
OpenURL and OPAC Links
All Paratext data sets are OpenURL compliant. For those librarians whose OpenURL knowledgebase or OPAC includes SUDoc Numbers, the Paratext data can link to these as well.
Journal of William Maclay, 1789 – 1791
| 001 | _ _ | 00000278 |
| 010 | a | 09026607 |
| 100 | a | Maclay, William |
| d | 1737–1804 | |
| 245 | a | Constitution of the United States - against the granting of titles |
| 514 | a | Journal of William Maclay, United States senator from Pennsylvania |
| c | (1789):28 | |
| 589 | a | Journal of William Maclay, United States senator from Pennsylvania, 1789-1791 |
| 650 | a | First Congress, First session, 1789 |
| 856 | o | o |
| u | ?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2FParatext&rft | |
| 856 | o | h |
| u | http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015051139726?urlappend=%3Bnum=28%3Bu=1 | |
| 856 | u | http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llmj&fileName=001/llmj001 |
Unlock the Potential of Government-Published Sources
Federal documents facilitate research in history, American studies, political science, foreign policy, business, economics, education, law, sociology, science, engineering, and medicine.
United States Masterfile (USM) provides a simple solution to help your patrons identify and locate federal public documents.
- USM is the only bibliography covering all 245 years of U.S. government publications—twenty-seven collections with a single search.
- Over 9.5 million links to digital content, including full-text printed material, maps, photographs, illustrations, and statistical datasets.
- For historical content not yet available digitally, USM provides guidance on locating material via library collections or through interlibrary loan.
- Permits SuDoc-searchable access to current and historic GPO shelf lists—highly valuable for internal depository processing.
- USM is also an easy-to-use tool for general researchers who may be overwhelmed by other products that presume an in-depth understanding of government information resources.
- Paratext datasets are available for whole institution access, for researchers from all disciplines.
Open Access and Full-Text Sources
Open Access, full-text material is constantly expanding in United States Masterfile.
New contributions from the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and the National Archives have brought the vast majority of citations available for open access to these full-text materials.
Open Access
Commercial Data Sources
