Try the New Experimental Congress.gov Chrome Browser Extension

Have you ever found yourself reading a news story about legislation, and wished that you could quickly discover the primary source that the article discusses? With that use case in mind, we are excited to bring you an experimental, open source Google Chrome browser extension that will provide you with enhanced access to Congress.gov from third-party webpages, such as news sites. The extension was created by Syed Tanveer, an intern at the Library of Congress, and it does two things.

1. If you highlight a bill citation on a webpage (ex. H.R.5515), it links the citation to the bill summary landing page in the current legislation collection of Congress.gov.

2. The extension also allows you to highlight text and export it to search against a Congress.gov collection of your choice. For example, you could highlight “John McCain” in a news story, click the “c” in the top, right-hand corner of your browser, and then search that text in the member’s profile page collection in Congress.gov.

This extension is in beta, so it is not yet currently available in the Google Chrome Web store. Click here to visit LC Labs and find out how to install it in your Google Chrome browser in developer mode. We are very interested in your feedback on the extension. In particular, we want to know if the extension is useful to you, which bugs that you encounter, in what context you find those bugs, and features you would like to see added to the extension.