Thanks to Inter Alia, we’ve discovered another handy legal research resource from the Washington Post.  The newspaper has created a free Votes Database, which allows users to browse every vote in the U.S. Congress since 1991.  You can browse late-night votes for sessions from 1991 until present, and you can also review a list of members who have missed the most votes in each session.  The site even publishes an RSS feed of recent votes by individual members of Congress.  This is an extremely handy tool for anyone tracking federal legislation or the voting record of particular members.

FirstGov, the federal government’s official web portal, has undergone a face lift.  It now features a revamped search engine that uses Vivisimo’s clustering technology to group search results by subject -- you can click here for an example of a clustered search result from FirstGov. According to news sources, the old FirstGov search engine only searched approximately 8 million government publications.  Currently, the search engine accesses 40 million government documents, some of which are not available on other commercial search engines.  Be sure to explore the extensive topic-specific links to government resources on FirstGov’s home page as well!

A student working on a cite-check asked us to decipher the abbreviations that appear after different versions of a piece of federal legislation in THOMAS search results.  (For those of you wondering what THOMAS is, it’s a Library of Congress website that compiles a wide variety of federal legislative information, including legislation, House and Senate committee reports, the Congressional Record, and more -- most of it is available in PDF format from the Government Printing Office.)  For example, if you search for H.R. 2520 on THOMAS in the records of the current session of Congress, you will see search results that look like this:

1.  Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act of 2005 (Received in Senate from House) H.R. 2520.RDS

2.  Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act of 2005 (Placed on Calendar in Senate) H.R. 2520.PCS

The letters that are tacked on to the end of the bill number (RDS and PCS) simply represent the different versions of the bill.  According to the Library of Congress, the meaning of these extensions "is largely explained in the preceding parentheses."  Thus, "PCS" stands for "placed on calendar in Senate," and "RDS" stands for "received in Senate from House."  Thanks to THOMAS for taking the time to create a useful and informative "Help" page!

The website for the Law Librarians’ Society of Washington, DC is known throughout the law librarian community as a great source for high-quality research resources.  The Society’s Legislative Source Book contains all kinds of useful information for legal researchers.  The Society has just introduced another new site, "Legislative Histories of Selected U.S. Laws in Electronic Format."  The page is pretty self-explanatory; you can view the laws for which legislative histories are available by popular name or by public law number.  For details about accessing the information on this site, see the Society’s explanatory notes.  Thanks to beSpacific for highlighting this item.

Jesse Silva and Karen Munro at the University of California have created Flash tutorials on how to "Find a Bill" (1989 – present), "Find a Hearing," and "Find Congressional Debate." The tutorials last two to five minutes each. Most include an attached live screen shot that can be used to try out the illustrated search techniques on Thomas and Lexis-Nexis Congressional.
 

Although the Heafey Law Library does not have older issues of the Congressional Record in print – as featured in the Berkeley tutorial about Congressional Debates from 1873 on – we do have the Congressional Record in microform (vol. 95, 1949 -- ) and have access via Hein Online. Print volumes (1909 – 2003) and additional microforms (1873 - 1918) are available at the beautiful, new Orradre Library. 

Thanks to the Scout Report for a link and description.