Non-Governmental Resources Supporting Congressional Research

摘要

Vendors have not been idle, expanding the work they had been doing to fill in the gaps as Congress was perfecting internal tools and allowing public access to them. In 2005, GovTrack (govtrack.us) made U.S. federal legislative information comprehensively available in an open, structured data format, freely accessible for reuse by anyone for any purpose. The U.S. Congress, 12 years later, began publishing open, structured data. There are good reasons to continue to turn to GovTrack, though, including the smart display of bills that includes sponsors and status, notable position statements, and a timeline from introduction through the latest event related to the bill. If you're unsure of what's available and how to get hold of it, a good place to turn is GovTrack's About the Data page (govtrack.us/about-our-data). From here, GovTrack hyperlinks to each data source about members of Congress, bill status, bill summaries, votes, bill text, what's coming up, district maps, oversight, and press statements. The presentation of data-GovTrack's use of graphics and visualizations to make data intelligible-may make this your go-to resource in the future, regardless of the launch of any future dot-gov site covering Congress. To find who represents you in Congress, enter your address. There's also a list of all members of Congress; you can search for former members of Congress from that webpage, which links to their official biographies. The webpage displays some interesting facts about congressional members, including the number of representatives and senators by party, a breakdown as to how many years representatives and senators have been serving in office, age and gender, and a statistical report card for each Congress.