Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced today that reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) are now online at crsreports.congress.gov. This is HUGE news indeed because many librarians and open government advocates have been asking for this for at least 25 years.
The site is a good first step, and hopefully will only get better over time — eg I’d love to see CRS reports in multiple formats (not just PDF) and in bulk start to be distributed to FDLP libraries and LoC provide MARC records so that libraries could download the metadata and add to their local catalogs like DOE’s Office of Scientific and technical Information (OSTI) has been doing for years.
However, Daniel Schuman, one of the co-founders of everyCRSreport.com and a long-time advocate for public access to CRS reports, points out that the site has much to be desired so far:
I messed up my thread on the new CRS reports website. Bottom lines:
-They are missing THOUSANDS of reports
-They're disclosing author names
-Faceted searching appears decent (but slow)
-They have some archival reports with stable URLs, but possible implementation problem— Daniel Schuman (@danielschuman) September 18, 2018
Many of us are hopeful that the site will continue to improve over time and that the Library of Congress will reach out to the library- and open government communities for ideas on how to make the site better for public access. Rome, and CRS reports database, were not built in a day 😉
I’m pleased to announce that, for the first time, the Library of Congress is providing Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports to the public. The reports are available online at crsreports.congress.gov. Created by experts in CRS, the reports present a legislative perspective on topics such as agriculture policy, counterterrorism operations, banking regulation, veteran’s issues and much more.
Founded over a century ago, CRS provides authoritative and confidential research and analysis for Congress’ deliberative use.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018 directs the Library to also make CRS reports publicly available online. We worked closely with Congress to make sure that we had a mutual understanding of the law’s requirements and Congress’ expectations in our approach to this project.
The result is a new public website for CRS reports based on the same search functionality that Congress uses – designed to be as user friendly as possible – that allows reports to be found by common keywords. We believe the site will be intuitive for the public to use and will also be easily updated with enhancements made to the congressional site in the future.
via Trending: Congressional Research Service Reports Now Available Online | Library of Congress Blog.
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Do you know if LC plans on adding older reports? This looks to be just the past year.
According to the Library of Congress “… all new or updated reports will be added to the website as they are made available to Congress.The Library is also working to make available the back catalog of previously published reports as expeditiously as possible”
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2018/09/trending-congressional-research-service-reports-now-available-online/