Congress.gov New, Tip, and Top – February 2024, Part 2

Earlier this month, Robert shared information about the first Congress.gov release, including adding PDFs of the Senate Executive Journal to the site up to the 43rd Congress (1873-1875). We have been working on bringing content from the Century of Lawmaking website to Congress.gov. With today’s release, we have added to the Browse page, under “Debates of Congress,” Page Headings and Index links for the Annals of Congress. This goes from the first Congress through the 18th Congress (1823-1825). These new pages are at a more granular page view level than the PDFs for the Annals of Congress that were previously added.

One big change with the release relates to the default behavior when clicking on the “Actions” tab. Based on user feedback from a variety of our user groups, we have adjusted clicking on “Actions” to go to “All Actions” rather than “Actions Overview,” which it went to previously. You can still see the “Actions Overview” by clicking “Actions” first and then selecting the overview. Now it is even easier to see all the actions when clicking “Actions.”

We have also added a new column to the House and Senate Hearing Transcripts Browse pages. For the House Hearing Transcripts, there is now an “Event ID” column, and “Hearing Number” for the Senate Hearing Transcripts.

We are always thinking of ways to better integrate video into Congress.gov. We have links on the homepage to watch the House and Senate floor. There will now be videos embedded on the Senate Committee Meeting pages that you get to from the Committee Schedule.

Enhancements

For this release, the Congress.gov enhancements include:

Enhancement – Annals of Congress – Finding Aids

• Look in the Debates of Congress section on the Browse page for links to the Annals of Congress Page Headings and Index from the 1st through 18th Congress (1823-1825).

Enhancement – Legislation – Actions

• Open the actions tab of a bill or resolution to see the complete list of legislative actions by default.
• Use the radio buttons to switch to the Actions Overview or to see All Actions Except Amendments.

Enhancement – Hearing Transcripts – Browse

• Click on the header to sort the House Hearing Transcripts list by the Event ID.
• Click on the header to sort the Senate Hearing Transcripts list by Hearing Number.

Enhancement – Legislation – Advanced Search

• Use the Or select actions with specific date ranges link from the Actions/Status section of the Legislation Advanced search page to find measures with two specific actions on specific dates.
• Date pickers only display months and years that fall within your Congress selection.

Enhancement – Senate Committee Meetings – Video

• Go to the details page of a Senate committee meeting to watch video of the meeting when available.
  

Congress.gov Tip

Did you know that you can listen to many pages on Congress.gov? The Help page explains that the “Listen feature is currently enabled for bills that have at least one bill summary, bill texts, the Congressional Record, committee reports, committee prints, committee hearing transcripts, and help center pages.”

Most-Viewed Bills

The following are most-viewed bills for the week of February 11, 2024.

Please share your Congress.gov feedback with us or in the comments below.

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