INTRODUCTION Public Law 104-53 (H.R. 2492), section 209, directed the Library of Congress to develop a plan for the creation of a single legislative information system to serve the entire Congress. The law directs that the plan be approved by the Committee on Rules and Administration of the Senate, the Committee on House Oversight of the House of Representatives, and the Committees on Appropriations of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Upon approval of the plan, the Library of Congress, or the entity designated by the plan, shall develop and maintain the system, in coordination with other appropriate entities of the legislative branch.
The law directs the Library to take into consideration the findings and recommendations of the Library's earlier study, required by House Report No. 103-517, to identify and eliminate redundancies in congressional information systems. The law also requires that the Library examine issues regarding efficient ways to make legislative information available to the public and submit its analysis to the committees for their consideration and possible action.
The Conference Report (H.Rept. 104-212) that accompanied H.R. 2492 directed the Library to include in its analysis and plan an evaluation of commercial sources of legislative information as well as the various databases and data creation, processing, and distribution systems extant in the legislative branch. This report constitutes the required plan and is submitted by the Library in accordance with the directives contained in Public Law 104-53.
In July 1995, the Library of Congress completed a study of duplication among legislative information systems supported by the Congress.1 This study documented the extent of overlap which has developed since the 1970s both among the systems designed for the collection and preparation of legislative data and among the systems designed for the retrieval, display, and printing of this information. The study found that while there have been steps taken to reduce duplication in the creation and preparation of data, there are still significant opportunities for reducing this overlap further and making the process even more efficient. With respect to systems for retrieval and display, the report found that, on balance, duplication has been increasing. Despite Senate proposals to eliminate its retrieval system and rely on the Library, overlap had increased because of the creation within the last two years of systems that contain common legislative information, including the GPO ACCESS system, the LOC THOMAS system, and the House gopher and Web servers.
Recent improvements in technology, coupled with the need to replace aging legacy systems, have led to independent efforts in the House, Senate, and GPO to improve their systems for data collection and preparation. This same combination of aging systems and recent technical advances has also affected the development of retrieval systems; the Library, the GPO, and the House are each rebuilding or improving their existing search and display systems.
The fact that these new development programs are under way now offers an excellent opportunity to reduce duplication and to increase the amount of coordination that should exist among systems that are so highly interdependent. One of the primary recommendations of this plan, which will be underscored in other contexts, is that the committees should act soon to ensure that these separate initiatives are purposefully integrated both to reduce duplication of effort and to improve the quality and compatibility of the systems being developed. Absent such a directive, the design and development of these systems will proceed quite separately, with the result that in a relatively short time (probably by the start of the next Congress), they will be much more difficult and costly to integrate.
The Library suggests that the plan contained in this report, after it has been reviewed and modified as necessary by the committees, can offer an effective means to achieve this coordination, particularly by the establishment of a bicameral working group on a new legislative information system (see discussion below). The Library further suggests that this plan, as approved, can provide the basis for the guidelines and agenda for the proposed working group.
The section that follows describes the major programs under way within the legislative branch to create and provide access to legislative information; it also updates the information contained in the Library's duplication study submitted in July 1995.
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