In FY99, CRS responded to almost 546,000 congressional requests, produced roughly 1,000 new CRS reports and issue briefs, and created over 1,700 custom confidential memoranda.

CRS benefits from a clear sense of mission and of customer identity. Although members of Congress and congressional staff can and do ask about an amazing variety of subjects, the CRS staff know from whom the questions will come, and the protocol for providing answers is comparatively clear. In some ways, CRS resembles a remarkably large staff of reference librarians, answering sophisticated inquiries in immense detail and with great professionalism; in others, it resembles a university faculty, performing original research on issues of public policy. Members of Congress and their staffs are generally pleased with the service received.

Because CRS requires quick access to information, it manages its own digesting services, it considers electronic forms as the best edition for its business, and it has an interest in such things as geographical information systems. In some ways, its agenda pushes other parts of the Library. The Geography and Map Division will benefit from its partnership with CRS, which wants the kind of GIS that Geography and Map has been wanting. In other ways, however, its special needs set it apart. Both CRS and the Law Library have research arms that prepare reports for their clients, but CRS requires a degree of confidentiality that makes it inappropriate even to share tracking systems for research. CRS might well be a client for newly acquired digital materials in the Copyright Office, except that the pace of the Copyright Office and the rate at which its materials find their way into the Library’s collection are generally too slow for CRS. Accordingly, CRS has been an early adopter of technology but has often done so independently of the rest of LC.

CRS has its own cataloging and information retrieval system—Star ILS—that it intends to integrate into the new Voyager ILS. It has the Public Policy Literature File, an online abstracting system available to Congress and CRS staff. The Inquiry Status Information System (ISIS), introduced in 1978 and upgraded in 1996, manages requests received from Congress and tracks their status as the work is performed. The congressional mandate to provide access to large bodies of text material—bills, the Congressional Record, and related materials—along with the requirement to reduce duplication of effort among congressional units led to the implementation of the LIS and THOMAS systems, which use a natural language query engine that gives online access to these legislative materials in a convenient and timely way. LIS and THOMAS have proven to be two of the most effective of LC’s forays into the distribution of online materials. They were implemented very shortly after the mandate and have continued to function—with occasional enhancements and regular expansion—very effectively. CRS maintains an active Web site and