In order to use the collections at the House Archives to their best effectiveness, please read the following tips:
1. If you are looking for a specific bill, please use Legislative Data Processing’s (LDP) Web site first. On their Web site, search for the bill number in the appropriate session and click on the “History” tab. This will show all the Committees through which the bill travelled throughout the session and its final ending point. From this point you can search the House Archives’ collections within the appropriate Standing Committee and session year.
2. If you are looking for a topic:
- Search the House Archives’ Collections using the “search” button. Because the number of bills that are introduced into each Committee is so great, the topic of each bill is not always stated. So, this search is not guaranteed to produce results. We are still entering information into our collection database (Archon) and, therefore, only a small percentage of our collections are searchable at this time.
- Thus, it is recommended that you search LDP first and then use our collections!
3. If you find in the Committee Records that a public hearing was held on your bill or topic, search the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Public Hearing Transcript Database where almost every public hearing transcript is available in full-text searchable pdf documents. Although the transcripts on the database are the “official transcript,” there may be additional information in the Committee’s records such as correspondence and research. It is recommended that you inquire as to what is available in the Committee’s records.
4. We are continually adding finding aids into Archon as our backlog is processed; thus, if you do not see the finding aid for the committee in which you are interested, please contact the House Archives. Our staff is able to search all of the collections for you.
5. Every collection is unique. Even though, in the case of the Committees, the same type of material is required to be collected, and in the case of the personal papers, the same type of materials is typically generated, there is less standardization than may be expected within the collections. In the case of Personal Papers, these collections are as unique as their donors and often indicate the areas in which they were most interested.