Most of our Congress.gov posts focus on the enhancements which are part of our three week sprint cycles by which we release new material and upgrades to Congress.gov. However, sometimes I like to take a longer look back at the work we have done and provide a bigger snapshot of the Congress.gov enhancements.
At the September 2020 Congress.gov Virtual Public Forum, I shared a few slides of our future projects. The first was a committee hearing transcript (pictured below).
We started adding hearings to Congress.gov in September 2020 with two Congresses (the 115th and 116th). The first phase included providing the full text of hearing transcripts and adding them to our search results. Over time we added more Congresses and now have transcripts for eleven Congresses going back to the 107th Congress (2001-2002). Later in September 2020, we added links to the transcripts from the All Actions tab on Legislation. As of October you can now listen to the text of a committee hearing transcript. Earlier this month, we made two additional enhancements. The first was adding the ability to browse hearing transcripts by date on the Committee Schedule Select a Date calendar. We also added links to treaty documents from committee meeting overviews (see “Related Items”).
The second future project was adding Statutes at Large that contain the text of public law to the site for historical material.
In February 2021, we added our first phase of the public laws to the site. This first phase covered the 93rd to 103rd Congresses (1973-1994) where we already had bill detail pages but not the public law text.
The third project was the revamped Help Center that added search capabilities and keyword in context to the search results.
We now have keyword in context on both the Legislation Text quick search form results and the Help Center Search results.