It looks like C-SPAN is now publishing a new index of its House and Senate floor proceedings -- The C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle. According to them the video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as the Record is available. It only includes members who appeared on the floor to deliver or insert their remarks. The text included is what the member submitted. Each appearance has a video link where users can watch and listen to the actual statements. This is great progress!

We asked our grantee, Metavid, to check it out and tell us how far C-SPAN's new index advances the transparency of what happens on the floor and they reported back that this is a big step, providing a slew of additional timed "metadata" (bill data, index to congressional record) that they can use to enrich their archive. The C-SPAN site is using the Congressional Record with archivists manually syncing up the record with the daily proceeding at per speaker granularity.[1] The closed caption based search which Metavid uses allows people to zero in on matching sections of video quicker but the official record is generally more accurate. Using both should greatly enhance the Metavid search functionality and may help illuminate the revision and extension of remarks that lawmakers are always taking about.