Tag Archive: Library of Congress

Tip of the Hat to THOMAS

by Daniel Schuman Jan 6, 2010 5:21 pm

In May 2007, Sunlight called on the Library of Congress to “create stable links” to legislative documents published on THOMAS.... View Article

220+ Years Later, It’s Time to Publish the Constitution Annotated Online in XML

by Daniel Schuman Sep 17, 2009 10:36 am

Today, the Sunlight Foundation called upon the Government Printing Office to publish the legal treatise The Constitution Annotated online in... View Article

S. Res. 118 – Free CRS Reports

by Ellen Miller Apr 30, 2009 4:59 pm

Once again, Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) has introduced a resolution in the Senate to put non-confidential Congressional Research Service (CRS)... View Article

Federal Agencies and Web 2.0

by Ellen Miller Feb 3, 2009 3:00 pm

Elizabeth Newell, at GovExec.com, writes about how federal agencies are beginning to stick their toes in the social media pool.... View Article

Open CRS Document Upload

by Ellen Miller Jan 27, 2009 1:03 pm

Yesterday, Open CRS, a project of the Center for Democracy and Technology (and Sunlight grantee), posted links to 47 newly... View Article

Library of Congress on Flickr

by John Wonderlich Jan 16, 2008 3:36 pm

You should proceed as soon as possible to check out the Library of Congress's page on flickr, as announced this morning.

It's an awesome collection of about 3,000 images, of the quality you'd expect from the world's largest library. It's wonderful to see them available the same way we expect to share images with each other, sort of making history less of something living in a museum, and more of something available, relevant, and even sorted through tags.

If you're like me, you're likely to do nothing else for the next hour or two...

Bibliographic Control, Agile Government

by John Wonderlich Dec 2, 2007 4:06 pm

I found this post from the Library of Congress blog yesterday, and it has me thinking about a bunch of other things I've been intending to write about.

Library of Congress Website Upgrade

by John Wonderlich Aug 30, 2007 2:55 pm

Via the Library of Congress blog, it looks like the LOC Website will be getting an upgrade in the coming weeks. They make a good point about choosing between providing RSS feeds and email updates, noting that many more people use email than RSS:

While only a fraction of people on the Web use RSS feeds, something like 100 percent of them use email, and this is just another part of our efforts to get information to people in the way that is most useful to them. You can get a sense for how the email updates will function by looking at the FBI’s Web site.

Happily, they’re not choosing between the two, and have a pretty broad set of RSS feeds already on offer on their RSS page.

Senate Legislative Branch Appropriations Review

by John Wonderlich Aug 23, 2007 1:41 pm

(Cross-posted from the Open House Project blog.)

The Senate Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill (reported out of committee on June 21st) provides a revealing look into the priorities that Congress sets in funding its own operations. The House and Senate pass separate appropriations bills; this page on THOMAS organizes the appropriations bills for each fiscal year in a remarkably useful manner.

While the majority side of the Senate Appropriations committee did include a brief review of their bill (as did their House counterpart), I’d like to give my impressions of the appropriations from the perspective of an advocate for public access and transparency, using the Senate report as a guide. (The Republican websites don’t feature any press releases, which isn’t surprising, given the minority’s smaller staff and budget, comparative lack of clout in controlling committee functioning, and their opportunity to add dissenting views to the report, as I discovered in reading the House report.)