FCC EDOCS

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The Federal Communications Commission offers a nice search tool called EDOCS.

EDOCS allows the researcher “to search a database of Daily Digest entries for FCC documents posted to the FCC web site since March 1996.” The Daily Digest is a brief summary of Commission documents, speeches, public notices, etc. with hyperlinks to the actual documentation.

The site offers a quick search with fields from FCC number, to release date, to title. The advanced search offers more options including the ability to search across a date range. The advanced search also permits the user to narrow results by Bureau and/or document type.

The site incorporates a set search to navigate the site. The page also links to a video highlighting the various features.

To test the site, I conducted an advanced search for the term “telephone” within the “description” field and limited my results to “reports.” Of the 17 hits, one was an interesting report entitled “Trends in Telephone Service” from 2008. Another 2008 report focused on telephone subscribership in the U.S.