New End of Year Congress.gov Enhancements: Quick Search, Congressional Record Index, and More by Andrew Weber.
From the post:
In our quest to retire THOMAS, we have made many enhancements to Congress.gov this year. Our first big announcement was the addition of email alerts, which notify users of the status of legislation, new issues of the Congressional Record, and when Members of Congress sponsor and cosponsor legislation. That development was soon followed by the addition of treaty documents and better default bill text in early spring; improved search, browse, and accessibility in late spring; user driven feedback in the summer; and Senate Executive Communications and a series of Two-Minute Tip videos in the fall.
Today’s update on end of year enhancements includes a new Quick Search for legislation, the Congressional Record Index (back to 1995), and the History of Bills from the Congressional Record Index (available from the Actions tab). We have also brought over the State Legislature Websites page from THOMAS, which has links to state level websites similar to Congress.gov.
Text of legislation from the 101st and 102nd Congresses (1989-1992) has been migrated to Congress.gov. The Legislative Process infographic that has been available from the homepage as a JPG and PDF is now available in Spanish as a JPG and PDF (translated by Francisco Macías). Margaret and Robert added Fiscal Year 2003 and 2004 to the Congress.gov Appropriations Table. There is also a new About page on the site for XML Bulk Data.
The Quick Search provides a form-based search with fields similar to those available from the Advanced Legislation Search on THOMAS. The Advanced Search on Congress.gov is still there with many additional fields and ways to search for those who want to delve deeper into the data. We are providing the new Quick Search interface based on user feedback, which highlights selected fields most likely needed for a search.
…
There’s an impressive summary of changes!
Speaking of practicing programming, are you planning on practicing XQuery on congressional data in the coming year?