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Where to Watch Congress Online

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This has been a great year for watching Congress online!  C-SPAN launched their Video Library .  It is an incredible resource that contains:

…[e]very C-SPAN program aired since 1987, now totaling over 160,000 hours, …in the C-SPAN Archives and [is] immediately accessible through the database and electronic archival systems developed and maintained by the C-SPAN Archives.

H.R. 4667 in the C-SPAN Video Library

In C-SPAN’s Congress section you can search for bills – such as this week’s top bill in THOMAS, H.R. 4667 – and find the related link to the bill in THOMAS, other titles, sponsors, vote, and actions on the bill.  In the “actions” section of that page you also can find and watch the debate from March 22, 2010.

The C-SPAN Video Library can be used for watching both the House and Senate.  In addition, in April this year, the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives released:

…a beta version of HouseLive to provide live, gavel-to-gavel streaming video of House Floor debate. The Web site was created to increase public access to House proceedings.

HouseLive Search for H.R. 4667

The site is an excellent companion to THOMAS.gov.  If you search the House Floor Proceedings for H.R. 4667, you can see all the times it was mentioned on the floor of the House this Congress.  If you click on Video you can watch the discussion on the bill.  To see the bill in THOMAS while watching the video, click the bill number in the Document box (the right side of the screen).  Then you can choose to see the status or text of the bill.

HouseLive Video with THOMAS

There are also YouTube channels for both the House and Senate.  The channels have a nice map interface where you can click on a state and see a list of its Representatives or Senators.

The Law Library has also increased outlets for its own videos.  The webcasts are still available on our website, but you can also find our “Law and the Library” series on YouTube and iTunes U.  Since the videos in iTunes U can be large files to download, we recently added audio-only versions.

Our top video on YouTube has been watched over 6,500 times.  It is our Frederic R. and Molly S. Kellogg Biennial Lecture on Jurisprudence from last October featuring Ronald Dworkin.

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