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Archive for the Congress Category (196 posts)

Trending: Congressional Research Service Reports Now Available Online

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This is a guest post by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. It is cross posted on the Library of Congress Blog.

I’m pleased to announce that, for the first time, the Library of Congress is providing Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports to the public. The reports are available online at crsreports.congress.gov. Created by experts in CRS, the reports present a legislative perspective on topics such as agriculture policy, counterterrorism operations, banking regulation, veteran’s issues and much more.

Founded over a century ago, CRS provides authoritative and confidential research and analysis for Congress’ deliberative use.

The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018 directs the Library to also make CRS reports publicly available online. We worked closely with Congress to make sure that we had a mutual understanding of the law’s requirements and Congress’ expectations in our approach to this project.

The result is a new public website for CRS reports based on the same search functionality that Congress uses – designed to be as user friendly as possible – that allows reports to be found by common keywords. We believe the site will be intuitive for the public to use and will also be easily updated with enhancements made to the congressional site in the future.

Moving forward, all new or updated reports will be added to the website as they are made available to Congress. The Library is also working to make available the back catalog of previously published reports as expeditiously as possible. More details about this process can be found on the site’s Frequently Asked Questions page.

CRS reports supplement the official congressional information the Library provides on its congress.gov website.

In keeping with our desire to engage users with the Library and its materials, we are happy to see these reports put to the widest use possible. I hope that you find them a useful addition to the many resources available to you from the Library of Congress.spacer

Congress.gov New, Tip, and Top for September 2018

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Andrew recently brought us the second set of enhancements to Congress.gov for August, which included improving the search form by labeling the Words & Phrases search and making it larger. In this release, we are excited to bring you enhanced saved search email alerts that are available for searches performed from the legislation homepage search form and the advanced […]

Congress.gov New, Tip, and Top for August 2018, Part 2

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Robert recently blogged about the first set of enhancements to Congress.gov for August.  Earlier this year, we solicited and received a significant amount of feedback on Congress.gov.  An action item from that was to enhance the search form.  We were told it would be helpful to have the Words & Phrases box be labeled and larger.  […]

Congress.gov New, Tip, and Top for August 2018

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At the end of July, Andrew wrote about the updates to Congress.gov, which included enhancements to House committee search functionality; adding a legislative interest column to the House: Legislation with Actions Related to Committees browse page; and the ability to search on legislative interest from the Committees section of the Advanced Search page. Adrienne provides more […]

Congress.gov at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park – Pic of the Week

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Summer and travel go hand in hand.  A manager who oversees Congress.gov, Bill Kellum, was visiting the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park when he noticed the following legislation from the Library of Congress website. H.R.267 – Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park Act of 2017, sponsored by Representative John Lewis, became Public Law […]

Congress.gov New, Tip, and Top for July 2018

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We just passed the two year anniversary of when THOMAS was retired to make way for Congress.gov.  Robert recently shared our second set of enhancements that we had for Congress.gov in June. One area where we have focused is on enhancing committee data.  With this release we are adding a legislative interest column to the House: Legislation with […]

Sign Up Now for the Congress.gov Webinar

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This is a guest post by Ashley Granby Wolf, an intern in the Office of External Relations of the Law Library of Congress. Join us on July 26, 2018 for our live and free Congress.gov webinar hosted by the Law Library of Congress!  Our legal reference experts, Barbara Bavis and Robert Brammer , will demonstrate […]