New from GovInfo.gov and Congress.gov

February 22, 2021 by Leave a Comment

Like most, when teaching in my Advanced Legal Research courses, I always like to stress reliable free sites for legal research, along with subscription resources, and two of my favorite sites to show are govinfo.gov and congress.gov. As I prepare upcoming lectures for this semester, I thought I’d share with you some of the most recent releases and updates to these two excellent, research-friendly government sites.

Govinfo.gov

GovInfo made several improvements and enhancements in its latest release (see full details here), but a few of particular note include:

A couple of other features of note: If you haven’t read the articles available on GovInfo (I’ll admit, I hadn’t taken notice of them until recently), you should give them a read in the Features section of the website; recent topics have included how to research Presidential inaugural addresses and an historical piece on the first live televised Presidential news conference. The U.S. GPO has also been making great strides recently to improve their publishing process, incorporating a new, XML-based system, called XPub. In the December 2020 release notes, they highlight a document published with XPub, H. Rpt. 116-562, The Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress – Final Report; to see how XPub improves GPO publishing and makes it more user-friendly, make sure to give that document a glance.

Congress.gov

Congress.gov issues monthly release notes, so I’ll highlight a few features added in the last few releases.

Shows the committee profile page and the alert link.
  • Fresh out of the (digital) oven, an alert service for tracking your favorite congressional committee! If you create a (free!) congress.gov account, you can sign up to get alerts from any congressional committee’s profile page. Alerts would include any time a measure is referred to the committee; whenever the committee holds a hearing or publishes a report; and in the Senate, any time a nomination is referred to a committee. Refer to the two images here to see where the alert link is on the committee profile pages and what alert options are available.
Shows the alert options
  • Also in the February 2021 release, public law text was added to legislation from the 93rd to 103rd Congresses (1973-1994).
  • For all my fellow advanced search nerds out there (you know who you are!), in the January 2021 release, they added some handy search fields to search amendments to any bills, resolutions, or amendments. amendsBill: and amendsAmendment: These can be used in conjunction with other search criteria to limit by keyword or sponsor.
  • In December (when they added so many enhancements they had two separate releases!), they added the bound edition of the Congressional Record from the 85th to 93rd Congresses (1957 to 1974).

I could keep going, but I’ll rein my excitement in. Suffice it say that congress.gov and govinfo.gov are constantly receiving enhancements and additions to improve the user experience and make more authenticated government materials available to the public for free. If you haven’t made regular use of these sites in the past, I highly recommend you give them a look. You might be surprised at what you find.

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New, Notable, and Fun: Recent Finds from GPO and LOC

December 6, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Government websites can be a boon of (free!) information for legal research. For today’s post, I thought I’d highlight a few news items and a few fun finds from the Library of Congress and the GPO.

New: GPO Director

Earlier this week, the Senate confirmed Hugh Halpern as the new Director of the Government Publishing Office. Halpern has held a variety of positions on Capitol Hill over the past 30 years, including Director of Floor Operations for the Speaker of the House. You can read more about Halpern in the GPO’s press release.

Congress.gov Enhancements

In November, Congress.gov added two new enhancements: First, for Senate amendments to bills, you can now see a list of any withdrawn co-sponsors. Second, in an effort to increase accessibility, Congress.gov has made improvements to their search results to make them easier to read for screen readers. You can see all the latest Congress.gov enhancements here.

Notable: CRS Reports on Congress.gov

We reported on this feature in September 2018, but in case you missed it, you can now access a large collection of Congressional Research Service reports through Congress.gov ( https://crsreports.congress.gov/). My favorite way to access the CRS reports on this site is to hit the search button without entering any search terms. This brings you to the index of CRS reports, so you can see the variety of subjects covered. Did you know the Law Library of Congress also creates research reports for Congress? You can access their reports as well, from the Law Library of Congress website.

Just for Fun: Library of Congress’ Free to Use and Reuse Collection

The Library of Congress has digitized large numbers of items in their collections, and have created a Free to Use and Reuse page, where you can browse these digitizations by category. Some collections, such as Veterans, Presidential Inaugurations, or Women’s History Month, might be more relevant to law libraries; myself, I’m partial to the Dogs collection (don’t worry – there’s a Cats one too). Perhaps the best collection here is the Not an Ostrich collection, named after this photo:

“Not an Ostrich” – https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.40935/

These are just a few of the new and notable finds from the GPO and the Library of Congress. Do you have your own favorite features? Please share!

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GPO and Law Library of Congress to Digitize the Serial Set

October 28, 2019 by Leave a Comment

The GPO and the Law Library of Congress announced plans last week to digitize the Congressional Serial Set going back to the first volume from 1817. The digitization will take place through the Law Library of Congress and the GPO will store the files and upload them onto Govinfo for free public access. The project is expected to take at least a decade to complete. This digitization effort follows on the heels of HeinOnline, which began digitizing the serial set several years ago and made the first phase of its digitization available in October 2018. Hein’s digitization has been made available for free to HeinOnline Academic subscribers, Core+ subscribers, and subscribers of HeinOnline’s U.S. Congressional Documents.

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