Library of Congress Unveils New Website for Legislative Information
The Library of Congress’s new site, Congress.gov, is “a significant achievement,” said House Administration Committee Chairman Dan Lungren, R-Calif., at the site’s unveiling on Wednesday. The new site, still in beta, is a part of a three-pronged Web update for the Library of Congress, said Jim Karamanis, its chief of Web services. That includes updates made to the Library of Congress site, LOC.gov, and a new site for its U.S. Copyright Office, which will come next year.
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One major update to the site will be the search function, said Congress.gov Project Manager Tammie Nelson. Whereas on THOMAS, its legislative information portal dating back to 1995, users can search for either bill text or bill summary and only in one Congress at a time, Nelson said, Congress.gov allows users to search across all Congresses and searches include all of the site’s data. The new site has “true cross-data search,” she said, and the search results will be listed by relevancy rather than bill number to help users quickly find what they're looking for. Additionally, Nelson said, users can narrow their search results with the site’s “faceted navigation,” which breaks the results down into subcategories including chamber, topic and legislation type, among others. Once a user has found the page he is looking for, Nelson said, he can share it more easily. Like THOMAS, the new site features “share” buttons for social media. URLs for Congress.gov are constructed in a more “user-friendly” way, she said, and unlike on THOMAS, URLs for search results won’t time out.
In addition to the changes to the search feature, the website’s layout is different than that of THOMAS. “We knew that we needed to get away from” the old layout, Nelson said. The homepage has a section for the leadership and legislative action of each chamber, which indicates to users whether or not the chamber is in session. When a chamber is in session, the page will link to the floor live video feed. When a chamber is out of session, the page will link to archived video. Users can search for members of Congress alphabetically or by state through the homepage as well. The homepage also has a section for the Congressional Record. Currently, clicking on that section will take a user to THOMAS, but the Congressional Record will be the first data property to be integrated into the site, Nelson said, followed by congressional reports.
The site’s layout is designed to automatically adjust to screen size, Nelson said, which will allow mobile device users to easily use the site. When we visited the site over a 3G connection on an Android phone Wednesday afternoon, it loaded relatively quickly and formatted correctly. But the links to pages for live House and Senate floor video were not mobile-formatted, loaded slowly and required a Microsoft Silverlight video plugin, which doesn’t work on either the default Android browser or the popular Dolphin browser app. The live House video, but not that of the Senate, worked on an iPhone using a data connection.
The site will provide new educational tools, according to Nelson. There will be nine videos on the legislative process, she said. Currently, the only video on the site is one titled “Overview of the Legislative Process.” The roughly five-minute long video is accompanied by a transcript. The other eight videos will be uploaded soon, Nelson said. In the meantime, users can access the audio files and transcripts.
The content structure of the website will allow people to better understand the legislative process, Nelson said. For instance, she pointed to the new “Bill Status” indicator. When relevant, the indicator will include a stage for “Resolving Differences.” The inclusion of that step, Nelson said, will allow people to “have a better understanding about how a bill becomes a law."
The Library of Congress is looking for feedback on the site, Nelson said. Congress.gov will go through periodic updates to incorporate more data and user feedback until it encompasses all of the information on THOMAS.gov, she said. At that point, THOMAS.gov will be shut down.
The new website will lead to “something that we all like to hear in Washington these days: savings,” Lungren said. According to Karamanis, “the Library currently operates two systems -- now three -- which will eventually collapse into one. In addition, the storage/server systems are more efficient in many ways and could result in some savings.”
Advocates of the government releasing information had some complaints about the new website. The site is not transparent enough, said Participatory Politics Foundation Executive Director David Moore. The site should provide machine-readable bulk data, Moore said, without which “we don’t have complete access to what ought to be free and open to the public.” The site is a step forward, he said, but it “does not address the primary request of the open government community,” which is access to bulk data, he said. “The most important thing is that they liberate the public data, so that anyone can build a website with it."
The public should have been involved before now, said Sunlight Foundation Policy Counsel Daniel Schuman. “They're having these conversations internally, but they really need to have these conversations externally as well,” he said of the Library of Congress. He commended it for the updated layout and educational tools. While the new site will continue to provide data in the XML format, Schuman said, “the way it’s being provided isn’t a way that’s easy to grab” to build other websites with.