Research Tools: Enhancements Made to Congress.gov (June and July 2017)

From the Congress.gov Enhancements Page:
July 2017

Enhancements – Legislation Advanced Search Improvements  

• Legislation Action Date Search
  • Date of Action and the Search in Actions/Status Text box now function together to support finding all measures that became law during February 2017 and other date searches.
• Limit action searches by House or Senate
  • Compare “referred sequentially” results from House-only actions to Senate-only actions.

Enhancements – Committee Authority Project (phase 1)

• Committee Authority Project is a multi-phase project to improve access to committee information.
  • Committee Names and Codes – Historic committee names added to help researchers identify years when committee names have changed.
  • Committee picklists on Legislation, Committee Report, Nomination, and Senate Executive Communication quick forms will be managed by committee authority rules, rather than committee activity data.
    • Committee picklists now provide a complete list of committees eligible to interact with legislation and Congressional documents for all congresses since 1973.
    • Committee picklists support cross-congress retrieval of items regardless of committee names changes.

June 2017

Enhancements – Search:

• Presumed AND for global and advanced search
  • Search < national park > from the homepage, and get 182 items (introduced prior to June 23, 2017) with the words “national” AND “park”, instead of about 2,578 items with “national” OR “park.”
• Legislation search form filters for Actions, Titles, and Summaries
• Nomination search form Date, Actions, Position, and Organization filters
• Treaty Document search form filters for Actions, Titles, Text of Resolution, and Index Terms
• Query Builder – text search box expands to support lengthy searches

Enhancements – Usability:

• Change “Facet” to “Filter”
• Print-friendly page scaling
• Print-friendly Amendment “All Information” pages

Filed under: Data Files, News