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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.'
That website is one of the hardest to use. One of the biggest faults is that there is no differentiation in the search results between major and minor efforts. Try these three searches and you'll see how difficult it is to use:
http://thomas.loc.gov/
1. Find the No Child Left Behind Act
2. Find the roll call of the recent Wall Street bail-out
3. Find HR 700 from the 103rd Congress (this should presumably be the easiest since you have the "key")
It's almost as if they do not want you to read it.
Just have them install SlashCode and be done with it. Then, citizens could even comment on legislation. The legislators could sort-by-highest-rating and filter out "funny" and "off-topic" and even get some insight into what the citizens think of the proposed bills.
I think that they'd be afraid of that. It would be too much of an eye-opener.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!