New Website to Find US Congressional Research Reports

For years, American open-government advocates have complained about the lack of direct access to reports prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the policy research arm of the U.S. Congress.

These reports are often very detailed overviews of a topic and the topics frequently touch upon international legal issues of interest to Canadian researchers.

Various non-governmental organizations, libraries and research groups have set up websites to archive CRS material and make it freely available to the general public.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that a new site has recently been set up that offers a free archive of thousands of CRS reports.

The site is called CRSReports.com.

The Washington Post explains that the new archive joins two other sites that attempt to make CRS Reports available to the public:

"It has competition, from the Federation of American Scientists and the University of North Texas, both of which have amassed impressive digital libraries of CRS reports (...)"


"But none of the three can claim to scrape the Internet for every one of the thousands of studies issued to members of Congress every year by experts on just about every subject that touches government. So it’s a race of sleuths to do the most exhaustive scans they can, from academic sites to postings by embassies and other groups."

[Source: Library Journal INFOdocket]