GOALS OF A NEW LEGISLATIVE INFORMATION SYSTEM

The Library recommends that the goals for a new legislative information system for Congress include the following. The system should

1. Provide Members of Congress with the legislative information that is the most useful to them in making informed public policy decisions.
2. Be comprehensive, timely, and accurate.
3. Be easy to use.
4. Reduce duplication.
5. Enable staff of offices, committees, and legislative support agencies to serve Members more effectively.
6. Enable Members of Congress to serve their constituents more effectively.
7. Provide a permanent, accessible, and portable electronic record of the legislative activities of the U.S. Congress.
8. Create links among the various components of legislative information.

The system should serve a variety of purposes and be used by Members and their staffs in a number of complementary ways. Examples:

• A Member of Congress or a staff person new to the Hill (or new to a particular issue) should be able to use the system to help them get up to speed quickly on any legislative topic. The system should require little training and yet provide easy online access to current and previous legislation, support agency publications, committee reports, hearings, and outside literature.

• A staffer should be able to use the system to check the status of a piece of legislation within minutes of action on the floor, call up the committee report on the bill as soon as it is available, view a support agency report on the bill, see an explanation of how that bill would amend an existing statute, and link directly to the portions of the U.S. Code that would be affected if the bill became law.

• A congressional or a legislative support agency staff person should be able to specify areas of legislative interest, and then receive daily, in a single integrated listing, information related to those areas, including new bills introduced, actions on bills previously introduced, items from the Congressional Record, committee reports and hearings, relevant support agency reports, news articles, listings (with links to the full text) of public policy articles in journals, magazines, and other publications, etc.

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