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LC 21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress
BOX 2.1 The Legislative Information System
As Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich directed the Library of Congress (LC) to develop a system for making legislative information available to the public through the Internet by January 1995. The Library did this using existing data and systems and creating a Web interface with a new search engine. Congress (through appropriations language) also requested that LC conduct a study in 1995 of the duplication of legislative systems across all legislative branch agencies. The study found considerable duplication, whereupon Congress asked LC to prepare a plan for a new system to serve as Congress’s primary legislative information system (LIS). The LIS was to be developed and maintained collaboratively by all the offices and legislative support agencies that serve the Congress. The Library and the Congressional Research Service were given responsibility for coordinating the retrieval component of this effort among all congressional offices (House, Senate, LC, Government Printing Office, Congressional Budget Office, General Accounting Office) and for making the information accessible. The result has been an ongoing reengineering of the collection, storage, and retrieval of legislative information across Capitol Hill, beginning with the clerks on the chamber floors and in the legislative counsels who draft the bills and extending through retrieval of the information through either the LIS (for members and staff of the Congress) or THOMAS (for the public). As a result of these efforts, there is now one coordinated, distributed system that provides legislative information to Congress and the public. Both the House and Senate retired their legacy retrieval systems and provide data directly to the LIS. This was one of the most remarkable successes LC has had in digital information management systems. Some of that success reflected the nature of the materials (legal texts are “flat” and structured at the same time) and some reflected the ability of the organization to react to significant outside pressure with a nimbleness and agility that are not seen in day-to-day life at LC.
CRS produces primarily two kinds of products:
Material distributed broadly throughout the Congress, including issue briefs that require regular updates and reports that were formerly static documents but increasingly are updated periodically. All issue briefs and a growing number of the reports are available to Congress via the CRS Web site.
Confidential work, which is guided by the principle that clients own the answers as well as the questions. Such work necessitates tracking multiple “original” works on similar or identical topics.33
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Since members of Congress are apt to use the results of this type of research in public statements, one can imagine that it is important that the results seem original. Simply distributing the same report with the same language and examples might create some embarrassing situations.
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