Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

October 19, 2016

Every Congressional Research Service Report – 8,000+ and growing!

Filed under: CRS,Library,Researchers — Patrick Durusau @ 8:20 pm

EveryCRSReport.com

From the homepage:

We’re publishing reports by Congress’s think tank, the Congressional Research Service, which provides valuable insight and non-partisan analysis of issues of public debate. These reports are already available to the well-connected — we’re making them available to everyone for free.

From the about page:

Congressional Research Service reports are the best way for anyone to quickly get up to speed on major political issues without having to worry about spin — from the same source Congress uses.

CRS is Congress’ think tank, and its reports are relied upon by academics, businesses, judges, policy advocates, students, librarians, journalists, and policymakers for accurate and timely analysis of important policy issues. The reports are not classified and do not contain individualized advice to any specific member of Congress. (More: What is a CRS report?)

Until today, CRS reports were generally available only to the well-connected.

Now, in partnership with a Republican and Democratic member of Congress, we are making these reports available to everyone for free online.

A coalition of public interest groups, journalists, academics, students, some Members of Congress, and former CRS employees have been advocating for greater access to CRS reports for over twenty years. Two bills in Congress to make these reports widely available already have 10 sponsors (S. 2639 and H.R. 4702, 114th Congress) and we urge Congress to finish the job.

This website shows Congress one vision of how it could be done.


What does EveryCRSReport.com include?

EveryCRSReport.com includes 8,255 CRS reports. The number changes regularly.

It’s every CRS report that’s available on Congress’s internal website.

We redact the phone number, email address, and names of virtually all the analysts from the reports. We add disclaimer language regarding copyright and the role CRS reports are intended to play. That’s it.

If you’re looking for older reports, our good friends at CRSReports.com may have them.

We also show how much a report has changed over time (whenever CRS publishes an update), provide RSS feeds, and we hope to add more features in the future. Help us make that possible.

To receive an email alert for all new reports and new reports in a particular topic area, use the RSS icon next to the topic area titles and a third-party service, like IFTTT, to monitor the RSS feed for new additions.

This is major joyful news for policy wonks and researchers everywhere.

A must bookmark and contribute to support site!

My joy was alloyed by the notice:

We redact the phone number, email address, and names of virtually all the analysts from the reports. We add disclaimer language regarding copyright and the role CRS reports are intended to play. That’s it.

The privileged, who get the CRS reports anyway, have that information?

What is the value in withholding it from the public?

Support the project but let’s put the public on an even footing with the privileged shall we?

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