International Governmental Organizations : European Union

The European Union is a group of European nations which have developed a Common Market system aimed at breaking down trade and political barriers between member countries.

As of June 2016, 28 countries belong to the EU, while five countries are candidates for membership, and two are potential candidates.

The UW-Madison libraries serve as a depository for European Union materials, and as such, have many print documents published by the EU and related bodies. Many are included in the library catalog.

Hints for searching the library catalog

• Search the name of the organization (or subsidiary body) in the
  • Authors/creators box to find publications issued by the organization
  • Subjects box to find publications about the organization
• Type phrases in quotation marks. Examples:
  • "European Union"
  • "European Economic and Social Committee"
• I would not use acronyms or abbreviations for the European Union (like "EU") or subsidiary bodies in searches, because it may retrieve too many irrelevant results

• The EU and some of its subsidiary/related UN bodies may use British spellings of words in their names.

  Example: "European Defence Agency"

  Try both American and British English-language spellings if you're not getting many results. Common words affected by this:

  American spelling	British spelling
  center	centre
  defense	defence
  organization	organisation
  program	programme

UW-Madison research guide: Current Europe

This brief guide is intended to help researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison:

• Find information about current events in European countries and the EU
• Connect to European and EU-related sites on the World Wide Web
• Locate EU documents and publications and finding aids which index them
• Parts of guide that have the most links to free, EU-specific resources
  • Reference Resources, including a section on statistics
  • Other Resources, including a section on IGOs in Europe

UW-Madison Law Library research guide: European Union Law

UW-Madison research guide: European Union: An Undergraduate Research Guide