Now over 1,000,000 Items to Search on Congress.gov: Communications and More Added

This has been a great year as we continue our push to develop and refine Congress.gov.  There were email alerts added in February, treaties and better default text in March, the Federalist Papers and more browse options in May, and accessibility and user requested features in July.  With this October update, Senate Executive Communications from THOMAS have migrated to Congress.gov.  There is an About Executive Communications page that provides more detail about the scope of coverage, searching, viewing, and obtaining copies.

I’m very excited about the debut of a new video series, Two-Minute Tips, which includes:

• Creating and Using Congress.gov Email Alerts
• Search Terms and Facets
• Navigating a Bill

If you know someone who is new to using Congress.gov, please share these new videos.

With this release there are two new items added to our Browse page:

• Legislative Subject Terms
• Popular and Short Titles (It is very interesting to see legislation reintroduced with the same name over time.)

For all the details on the changes, Robert provides a comprehensive update on the Congress.gov Enhancements page:

New feature – Senate Executive Communications:

• Included in “All Sources” searches
• Collection landing page supports keyword search of Executive Communications
  • Results sets can be limited by these facets:
    • Congress
    • Communication Type (Petitions or Memorials, Presidential Messages, Executive Communications)
    • Committee
• Searchable from Advanced Search
• Senate committee profile pages include Executive Communications referred to them

Enhancements – New Browse Lists:

• Legislative Subject Terms
• Popular and Short Titles

Enhancements – User Experience:

• Sorting options for all collections
• Results lists feature direct links to ‘All Actions’ for Legislation, Nominations, and Treaty Documents
• Two Minute tip videos have been added to orient users to
  • Create alerts
  • Use search terms and facets
• Legislative Action searches (on Advanced Search) are categorized by legislative process stages:
  • Introduction and Referral
  • Committee Consideration
  • Floor Consideration
  • Amendment Actions
  • Roll Call Votes
  • Resolving Differences
  • To President
  • Became Law
  • Veto Consideration
• Command Line search fields for:
  • Law texts
  • Bill Text Version types
  • House and Senate calendar numbers
• Nominations
  • Nominations Type facet features checkbox and “select only” options
  • “Date Received from President” added to the results display
  • “Major Actions” are now referred to as “Actions Overview”

Thanks again for all of your feedback on the site.  Please keep submitting it.  You might see your suggestion in an upcoming release!