"Policy" can refer to anything that establishes requirements, legal or otherwise.
Legal policy generally comes from laws, regulations, and court case decisions. These can be federal, state, or even in the example of regulations, municipal.
Sometimes you will have a specific policy in mind that you want to research (i.e. the Affordable Care Act, or Roe v. Wade). But often, we have just a topic that we are interested in, and need to find a related specific policy. Here are some tools to help discover policies by topic:
This guide represents all resources available through Fogler Library at the end of the spring semester. By the end of June, Fogler Library will be implementing a new Library Search system (replacing the URSUS Catalog) and a new home web page. This will affect some links on this page, and I will update them as I can. But I do expect some disruption. Please get in touch with any questions - lewis@maine.edu
For interpretation, historical background, and implementation effects of a policy, you need to find secondary sources of information. The best analysis usually comes from materials written by scholars, or experts, and published either through a editorial review process, such as books published by academic publishers, or a peer-review process, used by many scholarly journals.
Google Scholar may also be a possibility, but use it very carefully. We lose the ability to have edited, verified collections with this product. To get the most full text, go to the Menu bar in the upper left, click on Settings, then click on Library Links. Choose University of Maine - Full Text and then Save.
In addition to finding scholarly information sources, you will also need to find some government information sources. Government information includes actual laws, case decisions, and regulations, as well as reports (i.e. from Congressional committees, or federal or state agencies) and information designed to inform the public about policy changes and implementation (usually from federal or state agencies).
There are different search strategies for this type of information, depending on what you want to find. In this guide, there is a separate box focusing on tools for locating federal policies. And some govenment reports may be identified using the PAIS database. But here are some other resources that might be useful:
These are sites that can assist in finding the actual policy, which is your primary source:
Finding News:
