Use Mergent Online. This resource provides U.S. company data that covers 10,000 public companies and their SEC filings. It also provides access to current and historical annual reports from 1995 to present on U.S. and International public companies, all in PDF image format that provides faster download and allows viewing the document. Do a search for a company. Once the company information is shown, you'll see a tab at the top for Reports (Annual Reports tab in the old interface). SEC Filings are under the filings tab (Edgar tab in the old interface). However, they only show the most recent. To see the older SEC Filings (1993-present), you have to do a separate search under Government Filingstab. See the tabs at the top of the search screen.
Mergent Archives contains annual reports going back to the 1900s.
You can also use Proquest Historical Annual Reports, which includes decades of annual reports from hundreds of top North American companies. It is from 1844 to 2008 and it is only for companies that were ever on the Fortune 500 list, if available. If you're getting too many results, try to do an advanced search and select Company/Org from the drop down menu and then search by company name.
We have some older SEC filings that go back to 1978 on microfiche. See SEC File index by year. You'll have to use the index to search them. See SEC File overall index.
Edgar contains more recent filings to SEC. Companies were phased in to EDGAR filing over a three-year period, ending May 6, 1996. Click on Search for Company Filings.
If we don't have what you need (typically the older filings), you can order them, but it will cost you.
Order them through the SEC on the Public Records and Informationpage.
The Library of Congress (LC) has the following microfiche holdings in their Reading Room of the Adams Building, 5th floor.
a. Microfiche set of SEC filings that covers 1978-1994.
b. Two microfiche for Annual Report sets that cover 1847-1974 and 1975-1982.
The Duplication Service at The Library of Congress can be contacted for copies of the microfilm. Web page with contact info and prices for microfilm are on the Guide to Collections page.
