Permanent Links For US Legislation Documents

dizzymslizzy writes "With prompting from the Sunlight Foundation's Open House Project, the US Library of Congress announced today that its online database THOMAS will now generate persistent URLs, known as legislative handles, for legislation documents. As Free Government Info says, 'it is certainly nice to be able to link to legislation with a persistent link! But it would be much better if one could click to create a link rather than following a 600-word description of how to link on another page.' Still, this is a definite step forward for the Library of Congress and for government transparency. From THOMAS: 'Legislative Handles are a new persistent URL service for creating links to legislative documents from the THOMAS web site (http://thomas.loc.gov). With a simple syntax, Legislative Handles make it easy to type in legislative links to bibliographies, reference guides, emails, blogs, or web pages. Legislative Handles, for instance, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110hconres196, are a convenient way to cite legislation.'

Comments

Re:Thomas is one of the hardest sites to use

[xur17]

If you really want to find anything on their site, just use site:http://thomas.loc.gov/ ex: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=ig&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fthomas.loc.gov%2F+no+child+left+behind&btnG=Search I do agree though, the search on their site is awful.

Re:Just use http://www.govtrack.us/

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 for good link: http://www.govtrack.us/

-0.5 for making the link unclickable by putting it in the title

Things not to put in the title: links and the first half of a sentence concluded in the body (I usually skip over the titles).