Federal Government Information: Additional Legislative and Regulatory Information

For 35+ years, C-SPAN has pursued its mission to make government more open to the American public, telecasting political proceedings in millions of households across the country.It is available in 100 million American homes, providing access each week to hundreds of public affairs and political events, U.S. governmental proceedings, international procedures and reaction, non-fiction book discussions and American history features .

Weekly. Offers news, information, features commentary for and about the U.S. Congress.

Find your elected officials at the federal, state and local levels. View legislative alerts for the various levels of government as well. Find national media organizations, newspapers and magazines.

The basic tools for legislative work are few and versatile. A collection of the most important and general-purpose legislative tools are marked in blue, publicly-made tools in red.

The source for news on Capitol Hill since 1955. Today Roll Call, widely considered the newspaper of Capitol Hill, provides news and information that is considered indispensable for members of Congress and their staff. Roll Call delivers breaking congressional news and behind-the-scenes intelligence on the people, politics and personalities of Capitol Hill. In addition to breaking news, readers get keen insight from respected Washington analysts plus political coverage of congressional elections in every state in the Union.

Youngstown State University:
Historical Documents:
• General Indexes
• Congressional Indexes
• Historical Documents on the Web
• U.S. Serial Set

Covers the kind of questions one might find regarding bills and resolutions, US Code and US laws, legislative histories, congressional publications, committee publications and rosters, and federal regulations.

GAO's primary products are reports, often called "blue books," and testimony before Congress. GAO also issues correspondence (letters), which are narrower in scope, of more limited interest, and do not contain recommendations. With virtually the entire federal government subject to its review, the agency issues a steady stream of products, usually over 900 separate products a year.
The agency operates under strict professional standards of review. All numbers and statements of fact presented in GAO work are thoroughly checked and referenced.
All unclassified GAO reports are available to the public.

The Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C. (LLSDC) was established in 1939 for educational, informational and scientific purposes. It is conducted as a nonprofit corporation to promote librarianship; to develop and increase the effectiveness of law librarians; to cultivate the profession of law librarianship; to foster a spirit of ethical cooperation among members of the profession; and to provide for the further continuing education of law librarians.
Research Guides and Explanations, Resource Lists and Links, and Tables of Information

This is a selective guide to resources at Columbia University Libraries and on the Internet, for compiling a legislative history. Some will be available at Union too. Check our catalog.

They bring together the status of U.S. federal legislation, voting records, congressional district maps, and more. and make it easier to understand. Use GovTrack to track bills for updates or get alerts about votes with email updates and RSS feeds. THey also have unique statistical analyses to put the information in context.
GovTrack openly shares the data it brings together so that other websites can build other tools to help citizens engage with government.
GovTrack.us, a project of Civic Impulse, LLC now in its 10th year, is one of the worldʼs most visited government transparency websites.

The existing indexes to both the Serial Set and various agency series have always been valued reference tools, but one major thing lacking from them all has been a way to connect Serial Set volume numbers to specific SuDocs numbers over an extended period of time. (The Checklist of United States Public Documents 1789-1909, or 1909 Checklist, is a notable exception, although it, of course, stops with 1909 editions of all these series and does not give complete information as to Congress, session, or Document or Report numbers [they are almost always Documents].) This idea of correlating agency holdings to their Serial Set equivalents had been a project in the back of our minds here at Wooster for many years, but it was only in 2003, when our Five Colleges of Ohio Government Documents Subcommittee collected our holdings information for the national Serial Set Inventory project, that I decided we should take a look at our agency holdings to determine what Serial Set volumes we "owned."

The U.S. Congressional Serial Set, commonly referred to as the Serial Set, contains the House and Senate Documents and the House and Senate Reports bound by session of Congress. It began publication with the 15th Congress, 1st Session (1817). Documents before 1817 may be found in the American State Papers. In general, it includes: committee reports related to bills and other matters, presidential communications to Congress, treaty materials, certain executive department publications, and certain non-governmental publications.
The House and Senate Documents and the House and Senate Reports are available from the 104th Congress to the present date.
Numerical Lists of Documents and Reports from the 85th Congress (1957) to the present and the Schedule of Serial Set Volumes from 100th Congress (1987) to the present

The U.S. Congressional Serial Set Inventory aims to be a complete inventory of serial set holdings in U.S. libraries, from volume 1 through volume 13219-3. Libraries are encouraged to add their serial set inventories to the site. Researchers will be able to search and browse the inventories by serial set volume, by library, or by session of Congress.
The annotated Serial Set Schedule of Volumes inventory database shows for each Serial Set volume the following data elements: Serial Set volume number, Congress and Session, sessional volume number, titles or description of titles, the report or document numbers or number ranges contained in the volume, and the names of co-operating institutions' holding the volume. For Serial Set volumes containing six or fewer titles, the full CIS version of the titles as printed in the CIS US Serial Set Index are shown in the title field.

Patrons at the Law Library of Congress frequently ask for assistance in investigating the origins and statutory authority of federal rules and regulations which are important to understand, because they have the force and effect of law just as federal statutes do, though they are not issued by Congress. Instead, rules and regulations are created by a federal body such as an agency, board, or commission, and explain how that body intends to carry out or administer a federal law. In fact, these rules and regulations can often affect everyday lives even more directly than statutes, by laying out the details of how we go about following the laws passed by Congress. This Research Guide will address the basics of how to “trace” a federal regulation, in order to not only derive its statutory authority, but also to learn more about its origins and history

This details the history and development of the U.S. Statutes at Large and the U.S. Code with explanatory notes, listing of content, discussion of U.S. Code notes, prima facie and positive law and other matters rarely found on the web. Also for the first time on the web are optically scanned PDF copies of the six tables of the United States Code, 2000 edition. Finally there are links, with notes on content, to most all the known electronic sources of the U.S. Statutes and the U.S. Code.

This public resource provides information about more than 400,000 bills introduced in the U.S. Congress, currently 1947-2008, along with extensive information about each bill's progress and sponsor. It is used by researchers to study legislative institutions and behavior; by policy experts to study issue attention in Congress; and even by citizens studying their family histories (the dataset provides the only digitized records of tens of thousands of private bills introduced between 1947 and 1972).

The Congressional Timeline, developed and maintained by The Dirksen Congressional Center, arrays more than 900 of the nation's laws on a timeline beginning with the first Congress in 1789 and continuing to the present. A second timeline "band" depicts major political events as context for Congress's law-making.

The U.S. Congress Votes Database documents every vote and member of the House and Senate since 1991. Data is pulled from several sources, including the House clerk, the U.S. Senate and the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress. For the 112th Congress, users can analyze members and votes by various metrics, including caucus affiliations, 2010 margin of victory, and members endorsed by Tea Party Express or Freedom Works during the 2010 campaign. This site is a work in progress and will be expanded over time.

A service of C-Span, offering daily Congressional hearings of both the House and Senate, live.

Quick Links to House and Senate Committee Documents and Hearings
Compiled by the Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C., Inc.

Regulations.gov was launched in January 2003 in order to provide public users access to federal regulatory content. On Regulations.gov the public can Search all publicly available regulatory materials, e.g., posted public comments, supporting analyses, FR notices, and rules and more.