It's 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon and your boss drops a last-minute assignment on your desk. Before Monday morning you must find certain Pennsylvania revenue regulations as they read 20 years ago.

Specifically, you have to find the 1980 version of 61 Pa. Code § 815.49, which covers the "procedure for claiming and payment of prizes" for state lotteries and is a regulation from the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue.

Confident in your research capabilities, you reply that it won't be a problem. Mentally, you have already located them online and are headed out the door for a relaxing weekend. Your smugness quickly turns to despair when you discover your assumption that they are online is totally incorrect.

This article explains in detail the archiving process of Pennsylvania administrative rules and regulations and where they can be found.

Getting Started
In Pennsylvania, administrative agency rules and regulations are published in the Pennsylvania Code. These rules and regulations are updated in the Pennsylvania Bulletin, which is published weekly.

LEXIS contains the current version of both the code and the bulletin and older versions of the Bulletin back to October 1994. Westlaw has the code only.

On the Internet, you can find the current version of the code at www.pacode.com and the bulletin from 1996 to date at www.pabulletin.com.

Armed with the foregoing information, you realize that the online sources will not be helpful, so you turn to the books, specifically the code, for some clues. At the end of the current 61 PA Code §815.49 there is a paragraph labeled "Source" that states:

"The provisions of this §815.49 adopted Feb. 25, 1977, effective Feb. 26, 1977, 7 Pa.B. 529; amended May 18, 1984, effective May 19, 14 Pa. B. 1716; amended Oct. 12, 1984, effective Oct. 13, 1984, 14 Pa.B. 3759; amended Sept. 2, 1988, effective Sept. 3, 1988, 18 Pa.B. 4007. Immediately preceding text appears at serial page (126656)."

It is obvious that the code section has been amended a few times, but the last sentence is a mystery to most people. What is a serial page? This term is found at 1 Pa. Code §5.2, the section that covers the "certification of official text" for the Pa. Code.

Subsection (b) states: "The Director of the Bureau will cause each printed page of the code and a subsequent amendment to a page to be designated by a sequential and distinctive serial number; will collate sets of the pages in ascending sequence according to the serial numbers; and will cause the sets to be bound permanently into volumes of convenient size."

What does this mean? Each page of the Pa. Code is assigned a number that can be found in the lower left-hand corner in parentheses. In addition to being contained in the current Pa. Code, which is codified or organized by title number and chapter, the page is also published in volumes entitled "Pages by Sequential Serial Number."

The Legislative Reference Bureau first published these volumes in 1969, and today there are 241 volumes and more than 262,000 pages. Less than a dozen law libraries contain these volumes.

Subsection (b) of 1 Pa. Code §5.2 provides that the outdated code volumes are to be deposited in certain libraries and lists the following:

• Two copies to the state law library.
• One copy to the Allegheny County Law Library.
• One copy to the Philadelphia Bar Association Law Library (now known as Jenkins Law Library).
• Two copies to the Legislative Reference Bureau.
• Two copies to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission for preservation in the Commonwealth Archives.
• One copy to the Commonwealth Court Law Library.
• One copy to a law school situated in this commonwealth which makes a written request to the Legislative Reference Bureau.

Back to the Example
To find the regulation that you are looking for in this hypothetical example, you need to consult three different volumes of the "Pages by Sequential Serial Number" because Section 815.49 has been amended three times since 1980.

The present section leads you to page 126656, which contains the law as it read before the Sept. 3, 1988 amendment. Page 126656 states, "immediately preceding text appears at serial page (91076)".

Page 91076 contains the text of section 815.49 as it read before the Oct. 13, 1984 amendment and states, "immediately preceding text appears at serial page (76309). Page 76309 contains the text of section 815.49 as it read before the May 18, 1984 amendment and after its adoption on Feb. 25, 1977. This is the version that was in effect in 1980.

Finding an outdated code section is not as simple as pulling a book off the shelf by year. You must work backward step by step.

Although the pages by sequential serial number volumes are the only source for outdated codified Pennsylvania administrative rules and regulations, the bulletin can be helpful for locating uncodified materials. The source note also references bulletin citations where you could find the regulation as it was first published before it was codified into the code.

Although the bulletin references are not the codified version, they are useful for two significant reasons. First, the bulletin is more accessible than the serial page volumes because it is a widely distributed publication.

Second, when a new regulation is first published in the bulletin, there is an introductory section that explains the history of the regulation and a summary of any public comments that were received after it was proposed. This information is helpful to a researcher trying to understand why a regulation was adopted or amended.

Going Way Back
What about regulations that were adopted prior to 1969? If they exist, they must be obtained from the Legislative Reference Bureau, Pennsylvania Code and Bulletin.

According to Mary Jane Phelps, Director of the PCB, her office will research the materials they have available and make copies for a nominal fee. To facilitate research efforts, Phelps asks that the requester provide the PCB with the specific agency that issued the regulations and the subject matter. She can be reached at 717-783-1530 or lrbcode_bulletin@legis.state.pa.us.

In conclusion, until someone takes on the project of putting the large amount of outdated Pennsylvania administrative law online, researchers must be able to effectively navigate through print materials.

As for the hypothetical, after all that work, you find out that the specific wording of the subsection of the regulation that you needed to find hasn't changed since 1980!