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Senators Urge Upgrade of THOMAS

December 26, 2003 - 2:25am — Rochelle

A group of US Senators, headed by Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Jon Corzine (D-NJ), is urging the Library of Congress to make more content available on its THOMAS website. The Senators would like citizens to be able to access the same government information available to them on the Legislative Information Service (LIS). The senators who signed the letter to LOC head James Billington deemed THOMAS "insufficient as a portal to the Congress of the United States." More here from Federal Computer Week. And from the Project on Government Oversight, a comparison of LIS and THOMAS.

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December 26, 2003 - 10:17am — misseli

THOMAS keeping up

I think I got my first look at THOMAS around 1996 or 1997 ... it was astounding cool at the time. However, it looks like they stopped major redesigns of the user interface around the same time. It may be easy to use and efficient as all get out, but the way information is displayed is rather intimidating unless you're a savvy/experienced researcher. People expect more (and maybe even deserve more) nowadays. IMHO ...

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December 26, 2003 - 8:32pm — rteeter

Re:THOMAS keeping up

I think I got my first look at THOMAS around 1996 or 1997 ... it was astounding cool at the time. However, it looks like they stopped major redesigns of the user interface around the same time.

I agree. Have you ever tried searching for a bill from a past year? If you don't know what year it was passed, you'll have to search through each Congress (two-year period) separately. I thought that was just the way their database was organized. Now I find out, via the POGO link which compares the internal LIS system with Thomas, that members of Congress (and their staffs) can search across multiple Congresses. Why can't we?

Even more important than that, however, is access to Congressional Research Service reports. These reports have great info on current issues. The arguments for keeping them confidential are specious (again, see the POGO link). We paid for these reports, so we should have access to them. The POGO article gives some sites for CRS reports, but most of them are either selective or they charge a fee.

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