By the people now, for the people later

Abstract

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) serves Congress by providing timely, objective and non_partisan research, analysis and information services. The Legislative Information Office within CRS fulfills that mandate by maintaining a digital library of legislative documents known as the Legislative Information System.An ongoing challenge is designing these full text and structured databases for both promptness and permanence. This is accomplished by metadata and interface design. This foundation prepares for the impending incorporation of more complex born_digital formats such as XML, audio and video.Legislative Information System (LIS) clients are those who have access to Capitol Hill intranet systems. (The public version is the THOMAS site http://thomas.loc.gov.) LIS adds value to public domain legislative data with advanced text retrieval tools and the benefit of a portal site.The content of LIS is composed of several collections of documents. The House of Representatives and the Senate create and update legislative information, which is the bulk of LIS. The Government Printing Office publishes text and PDF formats of congressional documents, building up LIS's catalog of full_text documents. The CRS Bill Digest section, established by law in 1935 to index and summarize bills, adds additional metadata. In partnership with the user community, a high degree of data quality control is actively maintained.The primary entry point is a database called Bill Summary and Status. From there, links are available into the full text collections: text of bills, committee reports and the Congressional Record. These are large_scale collections. LIS maintains every published bill version since 1989. This session, Congress already has introduced more than 6000 bills and important bills often have up to five versions. The search pages have been carefully crafted to accommodate both novice and advanced users. A number of prepared searches are built underneath the search page interface. These gather bills on nebulous topics such as national security.LIS's primary role is as a prompt deliverer of legislative events and documents. For instance, a senator needs a current list of all co-sponsors on her bill. A staffer needs to read yesterday's floor debate. Legislative events in LIS are updated regularly to accommodate this fast_paced need for data. Searchers are able to specify narrowly defined legislative status steps in order to track current legislation. The LIS alert service sends out email notification when selected legislation is updated.LIS data is also used retrospectively to piece together a legislative history. A legislative history attempts to establish the intent of a current law by compiling documents created during the legislative process. A legislative history could include conference reports, congressional hearings, debates and early drafts of bills. All of these documents are available in electronic format in LIS. Each legislative step has embedded links to LIS full_text documents, creating an easy_to_maintain web of legislative history. In addition, a text analysis tool has been developed which allows paragraph level comparison of legislation. This tool allows us to closely track the evolution of legislative language.Future developments of LIS involve displaying full-text documents in XML, linking to video of congressional proceedings, and completing a retrospective conversion of past congressional content.The prompt recording of current legislative events provides the key to long_term access into our growing digital archive of legislative documents. Our primary designated community is the congressional staff, but the results benefit individual citizens, the courts and businesses who are trying to interpret the rules that govern how we live.