I love end of the year lists. It is nice to take a step back from the day to day or month to month and look at trends over time. Last year I surveyed the top 13 in 2013 and decided to add another item to the list this year. This has been an eventful […]
I have previously written about the budget process and appropriations. Now, I am turning to authorization legislation. In theory, process for funding the government is an orderly one in which each year the President proposes a budget; the U.S. Congress passes appropriations legislation; the enrolled bills are sent to the President for signing; and voila, government agencies […]
The Library of Congress launched Congress.gov in beta two years ago. Today, I’m happy to announce we officially removed the beta label. That’s roughly three years quicker than Gmail took to remove its beta label, but we won’t give you the option of putting it back on Congress.gov. URLs that include beta.Congress.gov will be redirected […]
The following is a guest post by Noriko Ohtaki, who was a research fellow at the Law Library of Congress. She previously blogged about Searching for Current Japanese Laws and Regulations. G8 leaders signed the Open Data Charter on June 18, 2013. Open Data is intended to make information resources accessible, discoverable, and usable electronically to the public, increase […]
This year seems to be flying by. Our team of bloggers has posted over 100 times to In Custodia Legis so far this year. Of those 100 posts, two of the top ten most viewed have to do with time. There is also significant interest in tracing legislation and Congress.gov. Advanced Search, Browse, and Appropriations […]
I have been looking forward to this Congress.gov release for several months. There is now nomination information, accounts, the ability to save searches, an expanded About section, an FAQ section, easy access to Member remarks in the Congressional Record, and more. With the new updates, you can locate nominations dating back to 1981. The nominations section […]
The hard work put in by the great Congress.gov team continues to pay off. The Webby Awards, which honor the best of the web, included Congress.gov as an honoree in the best practices for the web category. Voting is going on now for the five finalists in the Best Practices category: NPR Responsive Design Project, PBS Video, Flash […]
I was at a Congress.gov meeting earlier this week where Jill MacNeice presented the results from a round of unmoderated Congress.gov testing. During the presentation Jill showed this wall with responses to questions posed that included a heat map of where people clicked on Congress.gov. Based on hundreds of responses received, Jill was able to draw […]
There are some great new features and improvements now available on Congress.gov. Our team from across the Library of Congress has worked hard to have the first version of both Advanced Search and Browse in this release. I’m also happy to announce that another requested page from THOMAS has now made it over to Congress.gov, the Appropriations Table. As […]
The Congress.gov team had a very busy and successful 2013. Earlier this year Tammie and I were interviewed about Congress.gov for GovLoop’s DorobekINSIDER. To our pleasant surprise, we were recently named to GovLoop’s list of 20 Innovations that Mattered in 2013. During 2013 we added legislative data throughout the year. We launched with bills from the 107th-112th Congresses in […]