are therefore more difficult to track down. Some useful documents
may be lodged only in the library of the House of Commons or the
department concerned (e.g. reports on the tendering out of parts of
their work). All publications by local government bodies and nearly
all by QUANGOs are also naturally published by the individual
bodies concerned in an uncoordinated manner. For local government
see Nurcombe (1992) and Snape (1969).
EU documentation is as complex as that of the British government
(see Thomson, 1989; Thomson and Mitchell, 1993 onwards), US
government publications more so (see Morehead, 1996).
An important point to note is that most official documents are now
available on the World Wide Web (see below).OTHER PRINTED SOURCES
Politically relevant bodies like the Confederation of British Industry
and the Trades Union Congress, major pressure groups and the
political parties all publish numerous reports and papers which can
often only be obtained by writing to them direct.
Unpublished student theses and conference papers may also
contain valuable information. Some of these are catalogued by the
British Library and may be obtained from them on inter-library loan.VIDEOS/TELEVISION/RADIO
Electronic mass media sources can be valuable but are difficult to
identify, capture and use. The BBC monitoring service provides
some bibliographical assistance to academics. For undergraduates the
most useful source is your own library’s catalogue. The single most
useful source of video material in UK higher education is the Open
University, which publishes catalogues and provides broadcasting cal-
endars to the general public. Archives of news television programmes
are increasingly available on TV station websites, but there does not
appear to be a separate systematic index of this material.CD-ROM
All major libraries now have collections of material on CD-ROM
(compact disk – read-only memory) and facilities to view them. Most244 APPENDIX: SOURCES ON POLITICS