A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates 1774 to 1875 launched on the Library of Congress website approximately three decades ago. With that launch, the product was pretty much set in salmon stone with no updates.
Congress.gov, on the other hand, has releases every three weeks where we work to incorporate your feedback into improvements for the website. We have been working to bring over to Congress.gov the content from Century that is similar to what has been on Congress.gov, like the bills and resolutions and debates of Congress similar to the Congressional Record. Earlier this year we added the Annals of Congress.
We know that the migration of the Century of Lawmaking content is a work in progress. We are very excited to bring you the Senate Journal as part of today’s release. There is content for the Senate Journal from the 1st to the 43rd Congresses. In addition to searching, it is available from the Browse page.
We recognize that this is not perfect. At this point, we have a lot of work done and want to share it with you. Please provide us with feedback here or in a comment below on this new collection from Century or any of the other ones currently on Congress.gov.
To search the newly added Senate Journal, start from the global search bar and change the drop down menu from “Current Congress” to “All Congresses” and search. You will now see Journals in the Limit Your Search filter with other types of content. There is also a Journals filter at the bottom of all the filters where you can select “Senate Journal.”
I did a search for “Library of Congress” and selected “Senate Journal.” From here you can click into the search results. I have selected the first item from the results and go directly to it where you can see “Library of Congress” highlighted.
We hope to add the House Journal in an upcoming release. We have also been working on the Congressional Globe.
It has been a challenge bringing the older Century of Lawmaking data to Congress.gov. We are finding that not all of the data has been perfect. We hope that we will have a better user experience, but there might be some initial growing pains. Please do help us by submitting comments below if you find issues or via the Congress.gov Feedback form.
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