Frustration Mixed with a Small Amount of Reward

So the two main objectives for this past week have been to gather more books and congressional hearings which pertain to the development of the research universities in focus and as a whole. The result was a mixed bag of frustration, reward, and undeniable progress (as slight as it may be).
This week started on a solid note- I was at home at my parents house in the suburbs due to a family obligation and decided to check out my local public library to see if they had any books that would fit the bill for my internship. Luckily enough I found four or five (I come from a rather small suburb- hence the word "luckily"). These books were a good foot in the door. I found much more success as Loyola's Lewis Library. I found several books there and I can simply return to that particular section of the library to find a ton of other sources. So far- all of the books I've gathered pertain to higher education as a whole and lack any specific relevance to the five research universities that BizEd will cover. I sense that I'll need a bit more direction in this regard, and plan to bring the issue to the table during my next meeting with Dr. Shermer.
Despite the fact that the books pertain to higher education (and research universities as a whole)- I've examined the footnotes of these books looking for any reference to government documents. This was my starting point for researching congressional hearings and was mildly successful. I was able to find some hearings immediately on ProQuest Congressional or Lexus Nexus and will need some further assistance in locating a few other handy sources I've found.
The frustrating part of this week 100% pertains to finding congressional hearings on my own by the use of the two previously mentioned databases. Not only does it bring back highly frustrating memories from last semester's research pertaining to my Freedom of Information Act term paper- it frustrates me in there here and now as well. The only success I've achieved through using these two databases came from entering a general term into the search bar ("university", "higher education", "postsecondary school"). The search engines for these databases are brutally inefficient and fail to make sense to me on a very basic level. For example, after typing in "Higher Education" and "Aid" in an advanced search, hearings about the AIDS virus came up (which obviously have no use to me because I was hoping to find articles pertaining to federal financial aid). Another good example would be when I typed "higher education" (nice and general) into the search bar and tried to narrow down the search results (which were overwhelming) to the years between 1945 and 1970. ProQuest responded by stating that zero results fit this specification. This is ridiculous because prior to be narrowing down the search in such a way I could clearly see that hearings were found between the years 1945 and 1970. Either I'm being incredibly dense (a possibility I wouldn't necessarily rule out because as well all know research is much harder when one is frustrated) or I'm misusing these databases somehow. I'm voting on the second possibility, and have scheduled another appointment with Jamie (the government documents librarian at the IC) to see if we can get to the bottom of this issue.
Other than the hearings grinding my gears this week has been rather smooth. I have a feeling that things will go much smoother once I find out why I'm having such trouble with these databases.