The following is a guest post by Kimberly Ferguson, Supervisory Technical Information Specialist in Legislative Information Systems Management in the Library of Congress. Kimberly previously blogged about “Bills To Be Considered on the House Floor” Repository and Congress.gov interviews with Andy Mendelson and Valerie Heitshusen for In Custodia Legis.
We are pleased to announce the new Congressional Research Service (CRS) products collection that is searchable within Congress.gov. CRS products include coveted CRS reports, testimony by CRS analysts, infographics, and more. Find descriptions for each CRS product type on our About Congressional Research Service (CRS) Products page.
Public access to CRS products, which are produced for the United States Congress by the Congressional Research Service, is improved by several enhancements.
- Search CRS products and other Congress.gov collections from the homepage search bar
- Web-friendly CRS products
- New Congress.gov search form for CRS products
- Durable, predictable URLs
- Access CRS products from Congress.gov API endpoints
CRS Products in Search Results
Searches from the Congress.gov homepage search bar return CRS products and all other collections depicted in the “Limit Your Search” filter. See for yourself by checking out results from this search for “money laundering.”
Web-Friendly CRS Products
CRS products are now available on the responsive Congress.gov website, which adjusts to fit the size of your screen. Links to figures, tables, and related CRS products increase the discoverability of related information.
Related CRS Products links from legislation overviews expedite access to CRS products associated with legislation (see image).
CRS analysts embed links to the legislation into their products. Congress.gov makes those links easy to access from search results (see image).
Referenced Legislation links are also in overviews for CRS products, for example, Syria: Conflict Resurgence (see image).
New Search Form
The new Congress.gov search form for CRS products is good for researchers who want to focus on only the newest Congress.gov collection. Filters can be used to limit your search by topic, author, type, date, and status. In addition to searching words and phrases, the search form allows you to search by date range.
Durable, Predictable URLs
CRS reports have a new base URL: congress.gov/crs-products.
- The old URL, Congress.gov, redirects to the new URL, Congress.gov/crs-products.
- Find more information about our durable and predictable URL patterns on Linking to Congress.gov.
Appropriations status tables have a new base URL: congress.gov/crs-appropriations-status-table
- The old URL, crsreports.congress.gov/AppropriationsStatusTable redirects to the new URL, congress.gov/crs-appropriations-status-table
CRS Product Endpoints from the Congress.gov API
The Congress.gov API provides bulk access to CRS products. CRS Report endpoints provide more guidance about the new list-level and detail-level endpoints.
There’s More to Come!
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