For those of you who closely observe In Custodia Legis, you might have noticed that I recently updated my biography on the blog’s About page. I am now in the Office of the Chief Information Officer of the Library of Congress. I still work on Congress.gov, I just do it from a new location.
We are in transition now that Tammie has left, and I am trying to do my part to help out the incredible Congress.gov team. I am once again next door to Tina, just as we were before the Law Library’s Reading Room renovation.
One of the new things the Congress.gov team is working on is to have more frequent releases with a smaller scope. The first instance of this was Congress.gov’s July release:
Enhancements – Legislation Advanced Search Improvements
- Legislation Action Date Search
- Date of Action and the Search in Actions/Status Text box now function together to support finding all measures that became law during February 2017 and other date searches.
- Limit action searches by House or Senate
- Compare “referred sequentially” results from House-only actions to Senate-only actions.
Enhancements – Committee Authority Project (phase 1)
- Committee Authority Project is a multi-phase project to improve access to committee information.
- Committee Names and Codes – Historic committee names added to help researchers identify years when committee names have changed.
- Committee picklists on Legislation, Committee Report, Nomination, and Senate Executive Communication quick forms will be managed by committee authority rules, rather than committee activity data.
- Committee picklists now provide a complete list of committees eligible to interact with legislation and congressional documents for all congresses since 1973.
- Committee picklists support cross-congress retrieval of items regardless of committee name changes.