Finding Older Versions of the FAR

http://www.acquisition.gov/far/old_htmlframe.html

click on FAR Archive (2004 and older) at the bottom

this gets you back to 1995

FAC 97-02 , issued September 30, 1997 revised FAR Part 15 and made conforming changes to other parts of the FAR. There is a side by side comparator that was published by ESI International in association with The George Washington Universirty School of Business and Public Management. The title is "FAR Update The Comparator". It details the rules of FACs 97-01 (22 August 1997) and 97-02. It was a 223 page, 8 1/2" X 11" paperback volume.

The free internet came into its own in the mid-1990s The Federal Register, which contains FACs and other FAR Cases, goes back to the beginning of 1994. This site began in 1998, and for the most part, threw nothing away.

Check with your agency library system to see if they are linked to a pay-for-service provider. If there is no librarian, check with your legal department. More than likely they have a subscription. Maybe someone there will help.

Metteec, if you have access to the Pentagon Library, I believe it has older versions. If you are a government employee, the DCAA General Counsel's Office has procurement regulations going back to the DAR. Perhaps you could get access to those.

The GPO website permits you to access versions of the Code of Federal Regulations where the FAR can be found, back to 1996. It also has versions of the Federal Register where FACs were published back to 1994.

Thanks for the great tips! I followed Bob's advice and checked with my OGC. They provided me with a great resource that I thought I would share:

http://www.loc.gov/law/help/guide/federal/usexec.php

If you click on Code of Federal Regulations (HeinOnline), you can access the FAR going back to 1983.

Thanks. I had wondered if the LOC had done something like that. The Federal Register goes back to 1936. I've never used it that far back but there would be the civilian agency regulations (Federal Procurement Regulation) and the defense regulation (Armed Services Procurement Regulation).

Edit: I had typed 1938 instead of 1936 for the first Federal Register.

The first issue of the Federal Register, Volume 1, No. 1, was published on Saturday, March 14, 1936. If you have access to Westlaw you can research back to the very beginning. The first notice published in the Federal Register was an executive order enlarging the Cape Romain Migratory Bird Refuge in South Carolina.

For more background, see http://www.ofr.gov/documents/FR-History.pdf.

Vern:

What metteec found was the free version of the Federal Register.

March 14, 1936

Here are the years for

1936 to 1993

One just has to click the year and see the days of that year.

Is the free version searchable? Can you search for instances in which the term "competitive range" appeared in the ASPR before PL 87-653 in 1962, or for when it first appeared in the FPR? If not, it's interesting and fun of sorts, but not particularly useful for historical research unless you already know the answer.

That is the drawback of the free Federal Register. The free CFR has the same shortcomings that the soft cover version had. While at GAO, I used the loose-leaf version of the FAR with all the FAC's stored in a separate binder. I cannot remember what I used before 1984.

I was hoping that Meteec's law group would let him/her use the paid service that the law group uses. That is why I asked him/her to check with them. I may be wrong but I don't think Meteec is willing to pay the price for the Westlaw service.

Maybe this is the long way of doing things, but from the LOC website, I saved the PDF files of the previous year's version of the CFR from 1983 to 1993 and used Adobe Acrobat 9 Professional's OCR reader to make the text searchable.

That may be the only way to do historical searches in FR if you don't have access to Westlaw or Lexis.

Here is the source of the LOC online Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations.

https://home.heinonline.org/

They licensed the data to the LOC and have placed limitations on the size of the .pdf files one can download.