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

Look! Another Wheel

[Bios_Hakr]

I guess Google Docs was too difficult? Have these guys never heard of CMS apps like Wordpress or the like?

Shit! 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.

Leave it to the US Government to re-invent the wheel. And give the fucking thing corners as an added bonus.