GPO has a new version of its Comparison of Legislative Resources on GPO Access and Selected Government and Non-Government Web Sites (October 2008). It has separate files with tables showing the 34 GPO Access legislative
resources studied and the scope of each of eight Web sites examined. (Scope of GPO Access and Government Web Sites and Scope of GPO Access and Non-Government Web Sites.

The study compares legislative information available on GPO Access to House.gov, Senate.gov, THOMAS, Lexis-Nexis Congressional, Westlaw, CQ.com, and HeinOnline.

The study finds that GPO Access contains a unique mix of online legislative resources not duplicated in total at other sites. ("No Government or Non- Government Web site, other than GPO Access, contains Economic Indicators, Independent Counsel Investigations, State of the Union, United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions (Plum Book), and the United States Government Printing Office Style Manual.")

But, "In terms of scope of the legislative resources it provides, GPO Access is behind the other Web sites evaluated. Many of the other sites either contain historical content on their service or link to external sites with historical information, whereas GPO Access possesses current information that generally begins in the mid-1990s."

The last study (2003) and previous studies are still available at http://fedbbs.access.gpo.gov/library/compare/.

Hacking The Hill, By Shane Harris, National Journal, 12/19/2008. Also available at: http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/cs_20081220_6787.php.

It seems that it is "exceptionally difficult to protect congressional computers in a uniform fashion" and one panel has determined that Congress cannot manage cyber-security.

Govtack.us has announced some major new features!

• Site Updates in September, December 2008, by Josh Tauberer, December 20, 2008

The enhancements include:

Bill text pages have hyperlinked tables of contents, highlighted and side-by-side view modes for viewing changes to the bill over time, permanent links to a particular paragraph within the bill, and more. You can now make a comparison of the voting records of two members of Congress. There are links from members of Congress to videos of floor speeches and some financial statistics. There are widgets and APIs. There is a lot more; follow the link above for the complete list. Lots to use and re-use!

Thanks Josh!!!

In a CQ Weekly cover story, Tim Starks examines openness and secrecy in Congress:

• A Dome Under Lock and Key, By Tim Starks, CQPolitics, Nov. 30, 2008.

Most government information specialists will already know about Congressional Record changes, the exemption of Congress from FOIA, the unavailability of CRS reports, and will have their own anecdotes about the difficulty of tracking down information that, according to the textbooks, should be available. Starks gives more examples of more problems. This should be required reading.

Here are some samples:

• The Senate voted almost two years ago to disclose more information from the letters senators write requesting appropriations earmarks but the provision was quietly dropped the bill became law.
• A bill drafted behind locked doors in one committee, is debated in open session by another.
• Senate committee votes on a presidential nominee kept secret
• Some committees restrict access to amendments made during markup so tightly that no paper is circulated except on the dais were the members sit.
• The House Appropriations Committee has a surveys and investigation team assigned to investigate the worthiness of federal programs, similar to the function of the Government Accountability Office, none of the team's reports have been made public in at least two years.

The article even mentions, though briefly, the issue of some government information only being made available to the public through commercial sources.

Have you used OpenCongress.org recently? Are you aware of all its cool features, from RSS feeds to Facebook widgets? Check it all out is this short screencast:

• OpenCongress.org: What’s Happening In Congress? by ryanne, November 2, 2008.

From the better-than-nothing department: Thomas has posted instructions for how to link directly to legislation.

Well, it is certainly nice to be able to link to legislation with a persistent link! But it would be much better if one could click to create a link rather than following a 600 word description of how to link on another page.

Here is the essence of how to create a persistent link:

To link to Senate bill 254 from the 110th Congress, just add "110s254" to:

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation

.

Like this:

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110s254

The Sunlight Foundation has a new widget called Capitol Tweets, which updates you every 10 minutes with the latest tweets from members of Congress. It uses Congresspedia’s list of members of Congress who use Twitter.

See also: 'Capitol Tweet' widget follows Congress on Twitter, by Stephanie Condon, CNet, October 6, 2008; and Where is that official government information?, and Government Tweets.

Women in Congress, Created and maintained by the Office of the Clerk.

This Web site, based on the book Women in Congress, 1917–2006, contains biographical profiles of former women Members of Congress, links to information about current women Members, essays on the institutional and national events that shaped successive generations of Congresswomen, and images of each woman Member, including rare photos.

According to a press release, the Committee on House Administration has adopted new rules that "permit Members to post content on outside websites so long as the content is for 'official purposes'...."

On the one hand, this is a welcome relief from the rules the House was using, which seemed more appropriate for the nineteenth century than the twenty-first.

On the other hand, it will it make the job of identifying, authenticating, and preserving official government information that much more difficult.

John Wonderlich reports that the new rules say that Members of the House may post "official content" outside of .gov:

In addition to their official (house.gov) Web site, a Member may maintain another Web site(s), channel(s) or otherwise post material on third-party Web sites.

With official government information migrating to YouTube and other dot-coms and without deposit of official government information in depository libraries, even web harvesting projects will have little hope of being comprehensive.

Web Sites Push For More Transparency and Accessibility In Government, By K.C. Jones, InformationWeek, June 23, 2008.

This article describes the work of OpenCongress and MetaVid, which give citizens an open window into government activities.

OpenCongress ...gives readers access to more detail and depth of information than traditional news stories. The free, open source, nonpartisan site does so by combining traditional news stories, summaries of bills, sponsors, status, roll calls on the latest issues put up for votes, and an area for user comments.

...MetaVid... archives video from proceedings in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Citizens who want to see what their representatives said on a specific issue can search for and play the specific footage they see.

Today, The Sunlight Foundation announces a new project called Capitol Words which gives an at-a-glance view into the daily proceedings of the United States Congress through the simplest lens available-a single word.

For every day that Congress is in session, Capitol Words displays the most frequently used word in the Congressional Record.

For more about the project see John Wonderlich's post on The Open House Project website.

Of course, it has a widget (see below what it looks like and get the code here), an RSS feed, and an API. Try it, use it, re-use it!

VoterWatch has done an interesting analysis and enumeration of which hearings C-SPAN has broadcast and which it has not. It found that C-SPAN covered 28% of all committee hearings held during the week of February 4-10, 2008.

• C-SPAN Analysis: What Are We Missing?, by Billy Hallowell, VoterWatch, April 4, 2008.

  Hallowell notes that:

  Since our primary interest is in creating a video record of what occurs in House and Senate meetings, access to footage is paramount. Unfortunately (and as many of you know), our government doesn’t offer adequate access to video, audio, and transcripts, as the quality and availability of these items greatly differ among committees.

  Since C-SPAN is the main hub for Congressional footage, we decided to examine one week of network coverage to see exactly what the C-SPAN channels are covering—and what they’re not. While we are not attempting to fault C-SPAN for missing hearings (after all, covering all of the committees is an arduous and expensive task), we think it’s important to understand what we’re not seeing.

  Documents librarians will want to know that Bernadine E. Abbott Hoduski is on the Board of VoterWatch and FGI's own Shinjoung Yeo is on the Advisory Board.

I'm going to reprint James' comment from Wednesday on the Michigan digitization project here because I think it merits some serious discussion.  There were a series of comments on the way the government documents have been cataloged in the Michigan catalog because the variance in cataloging has caused a lot of the documents to be barred from public viewing "due to copyright":

I see a collaborative project!  it'd be great to be proactive on UMich's govt pubs. Rather than having to submit a form when an item is found that should be accessible/in the public domain, wouldn't it be cool if UMich put up a list of all their documents (in a wiki?) and let the community/public have at it to verify "public domainness" of documents. Documents classes could assign reviewing as well.

There is precedent for this kind of collaborative project. In 2006, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war (which was later shut down because detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research were available publicly! oops!!). A site called LibriVox has volunteers who read chapters of public domain books, many of which have been digitized by Project Gutenberg.The point is, let's leverage the power of the internet to help get govt information out to the public!

As it happens, right after I read James' comment I was in a meeting where I found out about another project occurring at the law school library at Rutgers University.  The project, Congressional Documents Online, is a full-text archive of Congressional Hearings and Committee Prints from the Rutgers law library collection.  The Law Library is in the process of digitizing its print collection of Congressional documents and the website says that there are "7064 documents available, totalling: 1581950 pages, 238814558897 total bytes, as of: Wed Dec 19 14:47:37 EST 2007".  All are freely available online.  There's a simple search box and a browseable list of the documents.

The February 2008 issue of Searcher magazine has an article by Laura Gordon-Murnane entitled "The 51st State:  Congressional Elections" (pdf) in which she talks about the other (non-Presidential) federal elections.  In November the nation will also elect 435 Representatives and 33 Senators, and we don't hear much about all those elections.  So to help educate us before we vote she has thoughtfully provided an online tutorial called Tech Tools for the American Voter and the 2008 Congressional Elections.  It steps you through  how to get educated for the upcoming Congressional elections. You can use it to find out if you are registered to vote, find biographical information on your Congressman or Senator as well as  his or her voting records, and follow the money donations and campaign fundraising for the upcoming election.   The tutorial shows different websites and how you can learn more about the voting process and the candidates. It's informative and it provides a painless way to get informed before casting your vote.

Hat tip to Sabrina Pacifici's blog, beSpacific.

What happens to the record of congress, public input, even roll-call votes when members of congress are given 15 minutes to object to a bill being automatically approved? Roll Call has the story:

• 'Hotlined' Bills Spark Concern, by John Stanton, Roll Call, September 17, 2007 [subscription required, but a copy is freely available here]

Senate conservatives are upset that the leaders of both parties in the chamber have in recent years increasingly used a practice known as "hotlining" bills -- previously used to quickly move noncontroversial bills or simple procedural motions -- to pass complex and often costly legislation, in some cases with little or no public debate.

The increase was particularly noticeable just before the August recess, when leaders hotlined more than 150 bills, totaling millions of dollars in new spending, in a period of less than a week.

The practice has led to complaints from Members and watchdog groups alike that lawmakers are essentially signing off on legislation neither they nor their staff have ever read, often resulting in millions of dollars in new spending.

...According to the Library of Congress' legislative database THOMAS, of the 399 bills or resolutions passed by the Senate this year -- which range from recess adjournment resolutions to the Iraq War supplemental bill -- only 29 have been approved by a roll-call vote. The rest have been moved via unanimous consent agreements, the vast majority of which were brokered using the hotline process.

(See also, just for fun, the Stinking Badges Home Page)