The Legislative Research SIS is gearing up for a new year of activities. Here are some of the things going on with the SIS this fall:
Expanded Legislative History Resource Now Available.
The Legislative Histories of Selected U.S. Laws on the Internet, part of the Legislative Source Book on the LLSDC website (http://www.llsdc.org/Leg-Hist) was recently updated and expanded. The site now encompasses almost all commercial as well non-commercial (free) Federal legislative histories available on the Internet. The commercial histories (Lexis, Westlaw, and HeinOnline) are listed alphabetically by the short title of the public law and then in public law number order whether or not that arrangement is on the vendor site. The layout is similar (but with less detail) to the two listings of non-commercial legislative histories presented just before the commercial listings. Each entry also has a direct link to the history's URL site or to its general vendor site. In addition, following the public law number list for commercial histories, are entries and links to large or special collected histories (such as the new GAO histories on Westlaw or collected tax related histories). Finally, at the bottom of the site are many explanatory notes about legislative histories, source sites, and citations to public law numbers as well as related statute, U.S. Code and C.F.R. cites.
SIS Seeks Volunteers!
The Legislative Research SIS has several big projects going on this year, and volunteers are needed! If you are able to help with any of the projects, please email Carrie Ansell at cansell@cov.com.
Union List of Legislative Histories: The first (and BIGGEST project) for the SIS this year is updating the Union List of Legislative Histories. The first meeting of the Union List Working Group has been scheduled for Monday, September 22, 2008 from 12 - 1 PM at Covington & Burling (1201 Pennsylvania Ave NW). This is a very important resource, that I know many of us (in LLSDC and beyond) use on a regular basis, and it will be a lot of work to update it. If you think you would be able to help in any way with this effort, please let me know and plan on coming to this first meeting if possible.
New Congressional Publications:For many years, the list of New Congressional Publications (http://www.llsdc.org/en/cms/?179) was updated and distributed by ONE extremely dedicated volunteer. This is too much work for any one person to do, if the project is to continue than volunteers are needed. If you still find this list to be useful, please consider volunteering to keep it updated.
Training Session on State Legislative Research: One of my goals for this year is for the SIS to develop and offer a training session on Conducting State Legislative Research. If you conduct state research as part of your job and would be willing to work with me to develop a training session on this, please let me know. I know this will take some time to develop, so I'm thinking that this will probably be the SIS’s last formal program of the year, sometime in May of 2009.
Fall Meeting Focuses on Training
Finally, the fall Legislative Research SIS meeting will be held on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 from 12 PM to 1:30 PM. It will be a roundtable discussion of legislative research training. If you do any training, or think you might in the future, please come and share your experience with others. We will talk about what format works best for training different constituencies, what we cover during our trainings, how to encourage attendance, and anything else that folks want to talk about.
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12-Apr-13
