Finding and Establishing Direct Links to
THOMAS and GPO Access Documents

THOMAS (http://thomas.loc.gov), the Library of Congress home page for legislative information and GPO Access (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/), a service of the U.S. Government Printing Office, are the two principle sources for free Web access to U.S. government legislative and regulatory information. Unfortunately, when using the search engines on the THOMAS and GPO Access databases it becomes apparent that many times the documents found have only temporary uniform resource locator (URL) addresses as revealed by the letters "temp" somewhere in the URL or the word "retrieve" at the end of the URL. If you want to e-mail a colleague with information on the location of a specific legislative document or if you are building a Web page that includes links to specific documents on THOMAS or GPO Access, then temporary URLs will be of no use. For that you need the prespecified URL address on THOMAS or GPO Access that establishes a direct link to the document.

Generally, both THOMAS and GPO Access have prespecified URLs for making direct links to their documents on the Internet, but all too frequently it is not a straight forward matter as to how to find these URLs. This article was written to briefly explain how you can find and establish direct links to THOMAS and GPO Access documents. THOMAS and GPO Access also have guides that explain some of this information. See links under "About THOMAS" (http://thomas.loc.gov/home/example.html) and under GPO Access "Help" (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/help/linking.html).

HTML Links in General

Once a prespecified URL address is found then to establish a link, HTML coding requires you to place the URL inside of the following formula:
<a HREF="http://www.xxxxx.xxx">yyyy</a>. With "http://www.xxxxx.xxx" standing for the linked URL and "yyyy" standing for whatever you want to name the link. In either case quotation marks are not required. Many word processing software packages automatically try to make links whenever they see a phrase beginning with an "<" directly followed by "A HREF". Anything inside the arrows "<>" is not seen by persons visiting your site. What they see will be what you name the link ("yyyy") and this will be colored and underlined. Clicking on this link will lead directly to the site linked.

Links to Bill Summary/Status, Text, and Reports on THOMAS

THOMAS (also comes up under Congress.gov)  provides bill texts, bill summaries, bill action histories, bill sponsorships, the text of the Congressional Record, the text  of Congressional committee reports, treaty and nomination information, and links to other documents and information.

To link to prespecified bill summary/status pages on THOMAS, which is available for all bills and resolutions from the 93rd Congress to the present (1973 +), use the following example:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d106:HR01714:

In this example 106 stands for the 106^th Congress (1999-2000) and HR01714 stands for H.R. 1714, the "Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act".

You can find this prespecified URL by clicking on the proper Congress (106th) on the home page of THOMAS and then perform a browse/search for the bill number (hr1714)  or a particular word/phrase (electronic signatures in global) with the result being a series of bill versions of H.R. 1714. If you click on one of them you will be able to see the text in a "temporary" URL. However,  by clicking onto the "Bill Summary and Status" link at the top of that bill you will come to the above prespecified URL. The URL will also work without the zero between HR and 1714.

To get a prespecified URL for the accompanying report to H.R. 1714  go into the summary and status file for the bill and click on the report link. However, there does not appear to be a prespecified link to each report "part." 

H. Rept. 106-341 (parts 1 & 2), to accompany H.R. 1714 has this prespecified URL;
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/R?cp106:FLD010:@1(hr341):

THOMAS has the text of committee reports back to the 104th Congress (1995-1996). It has the text of bills back to the 101st Congress (1989-1990) and it has a summary/status page for each bill back to the 93rd Congress (1973-1974).

Note that in every THOMAS display for the text of bills and reports, which are in HTML, there are links to GPO's PDF Display for these items as well (see below).

GPO Access has many legislative and regulatory files including Congressional bill texts, Congressional committee reports, Public Laws, the Congressional Record, the Federal Register, the Code of Federal Regulations, the United States Code and other files. And although GPO Access has fairly long URLs for many of it's documents, generally after running a search, the document addresses obtained are prespecified and you can use those URLs in any document in which you want to link. As noted above, GPO Access has a website (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/help/linking.html.) that explains how to establish links to most of its database files. The URL formula used by GPO Access generally starts out as follows:

http://www.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=

or

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/

with "cr09no99-75"; standing for the 75^th document ID given in the Congressional Record on the ninth day of November, 1999.

There are now prespecified links in GPO Access to individual titles, chapters, and sections of the United States Code 2000 Edition (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/uscode/index.html) and you can obtain these URLs simply by browsing the United States Code by title then clicking further into various chapters and sections (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/uscode/browse.html). However, if you run a search looking for a particular section you will only obtain a temporary URL.

The first supplement to the 2000 Edition of the U.S. Code is not yet available and so regardless of what any page section may say, such as "Laws in effect as of January 7, 2003," the information on each page is only current as of January 2, 2001. More current information is available from the Office of Law Revision Counsel in the U.S. House of Representatives which is charged with the responsibility of producing the U.S. Code (http://uscode.house.gov/). The site also has the U.S. Code Classification Tables (http://uscode.house.gov/classification/tables.shtml) that update the Code. However, the site does not have prespecified URLs to sections of the Code, but two other free sites which use the the Law Revision Counsel data do have such prespecified URLs. They are on the U.S. Code sites on Findlaw and on Cornell's Legal Information Institute. The currency of the material on the Findlaw site is clearly indicated on each page, but Cornell uses release date information from the Office of Law Revision Counsel which has little bearing on the actual currency of any particular section.