Video from all Senate Committee Proceedings In One Place

The United States Senate does not maintain a centralized repository for information about its committee proceedings that includes links to the videos. Our new website, https://www.senatecommitteehearings.com/, is our effort to address this issue and surface video from committee proceedings.

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The Recap: Library of Congress 2021 Virtual Public Forum

On September 2, 2021, the Library of Congress held the second of two virtual public fora on the Library’s role in providing access to legislative information directed by congressional appropriators in FY2020. (For reference, language requiring the proceedings was included in the committee report accompanying the FY2020 Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill.) We summarized the 2020 forum here.

The event was well attended — the Library noted over one hundred RSVPs — and several participants voiced their appreciation and recommended continuing the practice in the future. During Q&A, the Library stated that there were no plans in place for future public virtual events to continue, but indicated that we’d “hear more” about any such plans after the video was published. (No news so far.)

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Serial Set for 69th Congress is Now Online

GPO + Library of Congress announced they have completed scanning the serial set for the 69th Congress (1925-1927). A serial set contains all the numbered Senate and House Documents and Senate and House Reports for that period.

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News: Upgrades to EveryCRSReport.com

This past week we upgraded our EveryCRSReport website, which as of this writing contains approximately 17,700 reports. By comparison, the official CRS website has only around 8,500 reports. The result is that we will continue to provide you the most up-to-date CRS reports as well as an extensive archive.

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Library of Congress to host virtual meeting on its legislative information services

On Thursday, September 10th, the Library of Congress will host its first-ever virtual forum on the Library’s legislative information services at 10 a.m. ET. (Follow the link to RSVP).

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Drafting Legislation Just Got Easier. Introducing BillToText.com

Drafting legislation in Congress can be a daunting process. Typically, staffers provide an outline of the desired bill to the Office of Legislative Counsel (OLC), and an OLC attorney drafts the legislation. This often is an iterative process, with OLC asking questions and congressional staff updating their ideas.

This process can create problems for staff when they request feedback from other congressional offices or outside stakeholders. OLC sends the draft back as a PDF, which staffers can’t change on their own and other stakeholders cannot edit. This makes it hard to collaborate.  

We’ve tried to find a way to improve how Members solicit and receive feedback. We’re proud to introduce BillToText.com, a tool for more efficient drafting. 

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Bulk Data Task Force Reports Major Strides at October 2019 Meeting

The Bulk Data Task Force (BDTF) is essentially the justice league of legislative data. 

The task force convenes each quarter, bringing together the people in charge of managing Legislative Branch data—like the House Clerk, Secretary of the Senate, GPO, and Library of Congress—as well as outside stakeholders. Together the group works to make legislative data freely accessible to all.

The task force convened last week at the Legislative Data and Transparency Conference.

Here are the highlights:

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7th Annual House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference Announced

The seventh annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference has been announced!

On Thursday October 17th, agencies, data users, and transparency advocates will come together to discuss Congress’s efforts to make legislative information available to the public as data.

The conference covers what’s working well, what’s not, and provides an opportunity to hear from and meet with the people working to make things better.

You can RSVP for the Thursday, October 17, 2019 event here.

You can find recaps of prior conferences and links to video from the conferences here:

Recap of the July 2019 Bulk Data Task Force Meeting

Last week the Bulk Data Task Force (BDTF) convened internal and external stakeholders to discuss, you guessed it, congressional data. 

Established in 2012, the BDTF brings together parties from across the legislative branch—including the House Clerk, the Secretary of the Senate, Government Publishing Office (GPO), Library of Congress (LOC), and more—as well as external expert groups to make congressional information easier to access and use.

Scroll down for a list of tools, both currently available and in the works, as well as announcements from the meeting. 

New Tools

In development phase

“Track changes” for legislation: The Clerk is working on a platform that will allow for comparing versions of legislation; staff will be able to see how an amendment changes a bill and a bill changes a law. A version of the tool is already available to the House Office of Legal Counsel and a minimum viable product will be available to legislative counsels in August or September. The full version of the tool could be available at the end of next year, but TBD if it is for internal use only.

In research phase

Automated bill sponsorship tool. There are about 135,000 co-sponsorships on bills every Congress; the Clerk’s office currently spends five hours of each day in session collecting handwritten sponsor sheets and inputting names. The Clerk is examining the viability of creating an automated tool that provides a list of bills available for co-sponsorship online and, through secure means, allow Members to request their names be added to a bill. 

Unique identifiers for lobbyists. Currently, lobbyists are assigned unique identifiers (IDs) but those are not disclosed to the public; this makes tracking lobbyist activity very difficult. For example, if someone fills out their lobbying forms and there’s a typo, or they write their full name one year and a nickname the following year, there’s no way to tell that all these forms are covering one individual’s activity.

In discussion phase

A live feed of House floor votes. No plans have been made yet. 

Available now: 

An API for bill status in the Bulk Data Repository. You can find the GovInfo API here; to access it you will need a key from APIkey.data.gov.

Standardized committee witness forms in PDF format. Documents’ naming convention is “TTF” so if you’d like to look up witness truth in testimony forms you can go to Docs.House.Gov and search for “TTF.” 

Sites

The public can give feedback and submit requests for documents, data, and fixes at github.com/usgpo/bill-status.

Durable links to government information, can be found at GPO’s link service.

RSS feeds for content and metadata can be found at govinfo.gov/feeds.

When in doubt, check out the Legislative Branch Innovation Hub, home base for legislative data

The United States Web Design System is an open source site that brings together government engineers, content specialists and designers to make building government sites easier.

The Tech Timeline covers congressional tech history from the first House telephone in 1880 to the first House website in 1994, plus everything before and after.

New Sites

The Clerk’s Consensus Calendar tracks bills with 290 or more sponsors. According to a new House rule for this Congress, each week the Speaker must pick one of the bills with 290 or more sponsors for 25 legislative days for consideration on the floor. 

HouseLive.gov is being moved to a beta version of Live.House.gov.

The in-house video clipping tool has been replaced by FloorClips.House.Gov.

In August, ClerkPreview.House.gov will move out of beta and become Clerk.House.gov. Scrapers using the site may be disrupted or broken. 

Announcements

The 2019 Data Transparency Conference will be happening this fall, specific date TBD. Suggestions for topics and dates can be submitted on the github innovation site.

FDSys is officially fully retired. The old federal digital system was replaced by GovInfo.gov which has been online in beta since 2016 and out of beta since January 2018. 

Thomas was retired in 2016 and its replacement Congress.gov has had several upgrades. For example, you can now sort search results by subcommittee and historic committee names will auto-populate. Looking ahead, the Library hopes to offer email notifications for committee hearings and meeting information. 

You can trust the  Government Publishing Office: GPO was certified as an ISO 16363 trustworthy digital repository. It is the first U.S. organization to earn the certification, and the second in the world. 

Save the Date: BDTF Meeting on July 9

The Next Bulk Data Task Force will be on Tuesday, July 9, from 11:00 – 12:00, in Cannon B03 Cannon. If you cannot make it in person, it is possible to join remotely via a Zoom conference. (Contact the Clerk to make arrangements).

On the agenda:
1. Introductions/ BDTF Background
2. Project Updates
• GPO
• LOC – Congress.gov
• Clerk – Comparative print / New Clerk website / HouseLive
3. 2019 Data Transparency Conference
4. Questions/ Discussion

The last meeting was in late October, 2018, and there was a lot of news.

More information on the BDTF can be found on the Legislative Information Resource Hub, and don’t miss the recent Congressional Transparency Caucus event that featured 10 technology tools for legislating and oversight.