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Permanent Links For US Legislation Documents

Posted by timothy on from the get-crackin'-blue-book-kids dept.

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.'

3 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. DOI's use the handle system by 1_brown_mouse · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But they seem less convoluted and actually make an effort for you to find them easily.

    They are used extensively for academic publishing content.

    http://www.crossref.org/guestquery/

  2. Re:Got UV 5,000,000 Sunblock ? by TechForensics · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Cuz if you step on the wrong agency's documents .....Even crabs wouldn't scavenge upon you after that

    This kind of comment used to be a joke-- now, in the present US, it sounds like prophecy. God, people, just think of the damage wrought in the last eight years.

    --
    Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
  3. US Law needs a "Source Code Management" System by khafre · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is a bit off topic, but I'm surprised how fast and loose congress is with the laws of this country in general. I hope that, within my lifetime, no change to the law is committed to the books without some kind of documentation, a diff if you will, complete with names of everyone who worked on a change, be it a lawmaker or lobbyist. If someone amended a bill, it should be tracked and tied with the name of the person who added the amendment. How come companies can be so strict with the source code of their revenue-generating products, yet we can't provide the same controls on the laws that govern the United States?