Princeton University 
Library

Social Science Reference Center (SSRC)

United Nations Documents
United States Government Documents
Law Collection
Social Science Microforms
Data and Statistical Services
New Jersey Documents
Politics
Sociology
Industrial Relations Collection
Pliny Fisk Economics and Finance Collection
Current Periodicals & Newspapers
Reference Collection

Milestones in the History of the Social Science Reference Collection

The Social Science Reference Center began as the federation of three subject collections: the Pliny Fisk Collection of Economics and Finance, the Industrial Relations Collection, and the Public Administration Collection. Over time the Center incorporated the collections of depository government documents (United Nations, New Jersey, European Union and United States). The complex history of the subject and government documents collections in SSRC is summarized very briefly by the following timeline:

1884 Princeton University Library is designated a United States documents depository library.
1895 The Pliny Fisk Collection of Economics and Finance begins with a large gift of railroad and corporate documents.
1922 The Industrial Relations Collection is established, the oldest university collection of its type in the nation.
1930 The Public Administration Collection is founded.
1946 Princeton University Library becomes a United Nations and GATT documents depository, housed and served by the Public Administration Collection, as will all later depository collections.
1950 Princeton becomes a secondary New Jersey documents depository.
1964 Princeton becomes a depository library for documents of the European Community.
1970 First steps are taken to bring together the three subject collections.
1975 Microforms sets related to the social sciences are brought into SSRC.
1979 A separate documents division is established to process and shelve new United States government publications according to the SuDoc numbering system. Records for new New Jersey and United States documents, including documents of the 96th and subsequent Congresses, are no longer added to the Library's catalog.
1981 The first joint reference service is offered for all these subjects and for sociology.
1982 The U.S. government documents collection is incorporated into SSRC.
1985 The physical renovation to create the Social Science Reference Center, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is completed.
1996 Data and Statistical Services is transferred from CIT to SSRC.
2001 Marcive records for U.S. documents are loaded into Voyager. Currently received documents are again represented in the catalog.
2003 A single current periodicals collection is created from all the SSRC subject collections, including several titles from the documents collections.



United Nations Government Documents
The United Nations Collection, in stacks 78 - 92, is a comprehensive source for UN meeting records and publications. The UN statistical yearbooks are good sources of information, particularly about developing countries. United Nations specialized agencies are also well represented, including extensive back files of documents from FAO and GATT/WTO. Part of the collection is arranged according to the United Nations symbols. There is also a section of publications (Stacks 91 - 92), from commercial sources as well as from the UN itself, that is arranged by Richardson and Library of Congress numbers. The UN librarian can also provide help using the League of Nations materials in Firestone stacks.

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United States Government Documents
Princeton is a selective U.S. depository, receiving about 60% of the publications available through the Government Printing Office (GPO) Library Depository Program in all formats. Of the 8500 documents received so far this year (2004), 34% were paper, 9.5% were microfiche, 1.5% were CDs and 55% were URLs for electronic copies. CD ROM documents are housed in cabinets behind the reference desk. Documents received in paper from Federal agencies are arranged by Superintendent of Documents (SUDOC) number in Stacks 50 - 72. Congressional hearings and Committee prints from the five most recent Congresses are arranged in Stacks 47 - 49 and 93 - 95. CAUTION: Only hearings and prints for the most recent four or five Congresses are held here, the earlier ones are sent to the Annex. These are arranged FIRST by number of the Congress, THEN by SUDOC number. Hearings and prints since 1970 are also available in microfiche on C-floor. Stacks 72 - 76 contain U.S. population and housing censuses. The print volumes of the U.S. population censuses from 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990 are found here, and earlier census publications are found in the stacks. Plans are underway to bring the older census volumes from the stacks into SSRC. Some census maps, as well as U.S. document pamphlets, are kept in file cabinets next to the current periodicals and reference collection stacks.

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Law Collection
Princeton has an extensive collection of print and electronic primary sources of U.S. (federal) law and New Jersey state law. The strengths of the collection are U.S. constitutional law and international and comparative law. In Stacks 96 - 108 are the publications containing federal statutes (including slip laws), regulations, cases and digests such as Statutes at Large, United States Code, Code of Federal Regulations, Federal Reporter, Federal Supplement, and the Supreme Court Reports. In the nearby microfiche cabinet are the Supreme Court Records and Briefs. The laws and case reporters for New Jersey are shelved in the A-Floor corridor outside the Social Science Reference Center and adjacent to the main Reserve Room, as are the Atlantic Digest and Reporter, which cover the states in the Middle Atlantic Region (Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont).

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Social Science Microforms
  This collection contains copies of many government documents and other social science publications in microform. The microform cabinets are located in A-13-G, A-15-F, and A-15-H. A comprehensive list of the sets is posted at the end of each cabinet range. SSRC has one microfiche reader.

Other important microfiche collections of documents, including all documents cited in American Statistics Index (ASI), Congressional Information Service (CIS), and Index to International Statistics (IIS), are located on C-Floor (C-7-F and C-16-F).

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Data and Statistical Services
  The staff of Data and Statistical Services is composed of one data reference librarian and two data consultants. The data reference librarian helps patrons identify and locate data files and documentation. The consultants help patrons use statistical software and related utilities and the major computing platforms at Princeton, access and analyze data, and interpret and report results.

The codebooks and statistical package manuals used to support this work are shelved in Stacks 38 - 42. Both data on CD ROMs and the links to data available online are cataloged. The CDs are housed in cabinets behind the SSRC reference desk by study number. Check the catalog for both data and codebooks.

The Data and Statistical Services Laboratory is in A-16-H-3.

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New Jersey Documents
  Except for documents of reference value and current periodicals, currently received and older New Jersey documents (those received from July 1, 1981 through 2002) are slowly being cataloged and moved from SSRC to Firestone stacks or ReCAP. (Some older New Jersey documents are also in the Forrestal Annex.) If a search in the Library's catalog for a New Jersey document is unsuccessful, try searching the New Jersey State Library Catalog
for the state document number and check for the document in SSRC stacks 33 and 34.

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Politics
  Reference works and periodicals dealing with politics and government are integrated into the SSRC reference and current periodicals collections.

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Sociology
  Sociology reference service in SSRC serves the department's interests in sociology of culture, economic sociology and organizations, migration and development, social demography, social inequality, regional and comparative studies, and urban ethnography. Sociology reference works are integrated into the SSRC collection.

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Industrial Relations Collection
  The material in the Industrial Relations Collection deals with all aspects of people's relationship to work--labor economics, labor unions, labor law, personnel administration, unemployment, and technological change in the workplace, as well as social security.

Stacks 25 - 32 house over 100,000 pamphlets (in black boxes) arranged by labor union and subject. The pamphlets have been cataloged locally and can be identified through the IR Card Catalog (in the alcove opposite Stacks 33 and 34). The IR Catalog lists pamphlets and journal articles in industrial relations through 1990 ONLY. Proceedings of labor union conventions are shelved in Stack 32, though the majority of the proceedings are in the Forrestal Annex.

The monographs and bound volumes of periodicals (including the Daily Labor Report) in the IR collection are shelved in the regular stacks OUTSIDE of SSRC (A-17-F) by Library of Congress call number.

The offices of Industrial Relations faculty and the Education Research Section lie to the south of SSRC (A-16-J to A-19-G).

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Pliny Fisk Collection for Economics and Finance
  This collection supports reference service for economic conditions, economic theory, banking, international trade, development, finance, business, and statistics and for management, advertising, and real estate.

Princeton subscribes to many working paper series (Stack 8). These come from the economics departments of major universities as well as research organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Many working papers are only available electronically.

The filing cabinets next to Stack 1 hold annual reports of foreign central banks and stock exchanges.

On the FINANCIAL SERVICES AND DIRECTORIES TABLE are directories and investment analysis reference works, such as Thomson Bank Directory, Ward's Business Directory, Standard & Poor's Stock Guide, Standard & Poor's Industry Surveys, and Value Line.

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Current Periodicals and Newspapers
The current issues of economics, finance, industrial relations, law and political science journals, as well as the current issues of government documents periodicals, are shelved, alphabetically by title, in Stacks 1 through 7. Most of the older, bound volumes of these titles are shelved in Firestone stacks. In cases near the indexes, SSRC keeps two months of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New Jersey Business, and the Nikkei Weekly.

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Reference Collection
  The Reference Collection in Stacks 9 - 25 was built from the materials in the subject and documents collections to support reference assistance in economics, finance, government, industrial relations, law, military science, public opinion, sociology, and sports. It includes every type of reference work--handbooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, chronologies, gazetteers, guides to microform sets, indexes, and statistical compilations--important to the social sciences. Notable titles include Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, and National Journal, Daily Stock Price Record, Moody's Manuals, Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court, and A Guide to Writing Sociology Papers.

ATLASES
SSRC owns a few atlases, which are kept on top of Index Bookcases I31 - I34. These are the Rand McNally Road Atlas and Commercial Atlas & Marketing Guide, Times Atlas of the World, National Geographic Atlas of the World, Historical Atlas of United States Congressional Districts, Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress, Atlas of the Middle East, National Economic Atlas of China, and Socio-economic Atlas of India.

INDEX BOOKCASES AND COMPUTER WORK STATIONS
This area houses numbered bookcases which hold indexes in economics, sociology, politics, law, and industrial relations, and indexes to international, federal, state, and municipal government documents. The Guide to Print Indexes and Online Equivalents lists both the indexes that exist only in print and the ones for which there is a database to which Princeton subscribes. The computer terminals provide access to the databases generally available to the University community and to the electronic resources not available campus-wide such as the financial and legal sources from Datastream International, Securities Data Company, Lexis Commercial and Westlaw Commercial, which are restricted for use by Princeton University students and faculty for educational purposes.

STATE REFERENCE
In bookcases 18 and 19 are the latest available state manuals for each of the fifty states. They also contain The Book of the States.

READY REFERENCE
The Ready Reference Collection contains the dictionaries, directories, handbooks, statistical compilations, and other key, frequently used reference materials chosen from each SSRC subject and document collection.

FOREIGN STATISTICAL YEARBOOKS
Immediately to the left of the Ready Reference Collection are the foreign statistical yearbooks. The Center attempts to acquire the most recent statistical yearbook for each member country of the United Nations. They are arranged alphabetically by country. The older volumes of these yearbooks are in Firestone stacks. They are supplemented by the microforms set Current National Statistical Compendiums, which contains yearbooks going back to 1970 for some countries, and is housed in SSRC microfiche cabinet 78 at the back of the room.

CD ROM CABINETS
Cd roms and floppy disks from the U.S. documents collection, Data and Statistical Services and Pliny Fisk are stored here, the documents cds by SuDoc number, the DSS cds and floppies by study number (an accession number) and the Pliny Fisk cds (Disclosure SEC, Morningstar Principia-for Closed-End Funds and Plus for Mutual Funds and Worldscope) by title.

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Alphabetical List of SSRC Staff
Alphabetical List SSRC Staff by Function

Last revised August 24, 2004