Today, we’re bringing you the latest Congress.gov updates just in time for the arrival of spring. Last month, Andrew brought you the latest updates to saved search alert functionality. For the April release, we have improved the sorting of search results, so that items in the current Congress now appear at the top when sorting by relevancy.
Our work on committee authority records also continues in this release. The profile pages of inactive committees now indicate that a committee’s status is terminated and the years when the committee was active. Please see the full list of enhancements included in this release, listed below.
Find specific House Communications that have a relationship to a specific House Document when you use the “House Document Title or Number” search limiter.
Example – Retrieve 115PM8, which has a relationship to 115#H.Doc.3.
Enhancement – Improved mobile view for browse reports
Congress.gov browse report pages that display information in multi-column tables now have scroll bars, enabling mobile device users to navigate content more easily.
Printing multiple pages of Congress.gov search results? These tips will help you generate the material you need in your choice of two formats.
1. When you want to print multiple pages of search results as they display on your computer screen, select the Print button in the right navigation. For best results, use the Chrome web browser. Other popular browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox print just one page even when multiple pages of search results are present.
Printing multiple pages of Congress.gov search results. Photo by Adrienne Keys.
2. Another option is to use the Download Results feature to export up to 1000 search results to a printable spreadsheet. After performing a search, select the Download Results option above the left navigation on the search results page. Data visible in the expanded search results view, plus a link to each item, will download to a CSV file, which you can choose to open with a program such as Excel. This option works well across popular web browsers.
Downloading search results on Congress.gov. Photo by Adrienne Keys.
The Download Results link is available on search results displays for each Congress.gov data collection except Legislation Text. The link is also not yet available in search results displays after searching across collections. For more information, see the Download Results Help page.
Top 10
The Most-Viewed Bills for March 25, 2018 all are from the 115th Congress.