SOC 375: Urban Sociology: Planning Reports

Most planning reports have been cataloged in the library online catalog, including some online reports. Most, but not all, are located in the Planning Reports Collection.  Uncataloged reports will still be in the collection in the basement, organized by geography, interfiled with the cataloged reports.  For instance, all the "Lansing" reports are filed together, whether they appear in the online catalog or not.

The two major ways of finding planning reports in the catalog are: Keyword Search and Call Number Search.

• Keyword search: The phrase "planning reports" appears in every catalog record regardless of their topic (which might range from master plans to bicycle plans, zoning regulations, etc.)
  
  Example: detroit and land use and "planning reports". Note that this search retrieves over 70 reports. The keyword search organizes the results with newest report listed first.
   
• Call Number Search: If you want to search by call number, go to the "Other" call number search. Call numbers are text, based on the geography covered by the report.
  
  Example: MICHIGAN Kalamazoo. This search retrieves the over 40 reports with a call number of "Michigan Kalamazoo" but also the reports with a call number of Kalamazoo County, and Kalamazoo Metropolitan Area, and other related geographies
  
  CALIFORNIA San Francisco This search retrieves the over 20 reports we have for San Francisco, but also several reports classed as "San Francisco Bay Area"

The collection is organized by geography, beginning with ALABAMA and ending with ZIMBABWE. A person might go to the Planning Report collection in basement center and browse the collection for a geographic area of interest. Planning Reports for Michigan State University, for instance, have the call number

MICHIGAN
East Lansing
First words of title...

Planning Reports of interest to the larger campus community might also be filed under larger geographies (depending on the scope of the work) such as

MICHIGAN
Ingham County

or

MICHIGAN
Lansing Metropolitan Area

or

MICHIGAN
Tri County Regional Planning Commission

Many online Planning Reports that have not yet been cataloged have been gathered into two Research Guides:
Michigan Planning Reports
and
Local Government Planning Reports: Non-Michigan

Other planning reports might be found freely online (many newer reports have been published online, but not all) by using a web search engine and searching:

nameoftown master plan

or
nameoftown comprehensive plan

or
nameoftown land use