ABOUT THOMAS
| THOMAS Databases | How Often Is THOMAS Updated? | THOMAS Usage Statistics | About INQUERY |
Acting under the directive of the leadership of the 104th Congress to make Federal legislative information freely available to the Internet public, a Library of Congress programming team brought the THOMAS World-Wide-Web-based system online in January 1995, at the inception of the 104th Congress. The first database made available was Bill Text, followed shortly by Congressional Record Text, Bill Summary & Status, Hot Bills, the Congressional Record Index, and the Constitution. Enhancements in data and search and display capabilities have been continuously added for each database. The next major database to come up under THOMAS will be the full text of Committee reports.
THOMAS DATABASES
THOMAS currently offers the following databases:
- Hot Bills:
- Coverage: 104th Congress
- Description: Hot Bills are defined as those bills and amendments that are the subject of floor action, debate, and/or hearings in Congress and, as such, are often the topics of popular media coverage. Hot bill/amendment numbers are linked to THOMAS Bill Summary & Status records.
- Access: Browsable by topic, short/popular titles, bill/amendment numbers, bills enacted into law, and hot legislation under consideration by Congress during the current week.
- Bill Summary & Status
- Coverage: 104th Congress
- Description: Information about bills and amendments. For each bill is provided sponsor(s), cosponsor(s), official, short and popular titles, floor actions, detailed legislative history*, Congressional Record page references, bill digest, committees of referral, reporting and origin, subcommittees of referral, links to other committee information on the WWW servers operated by the House and the Senate*, amendment descriptions (and text when available), subjects (indexing terms assigned to each bill), and a link to the full text of the bill/law.
- Access: Searchable by keyword/phrase, index term, bill/amendment number, sponsor/cosponsor, and committee. Searches may be limited to those bills/amendments receiving floor action. Browsable lists of public laws and vetoed bills.
*Coming soon.
- Bill Text
- Coverage: 104th Congress, 103rd Congress
- Description: Full text of all Government Printing Office (GPO)-supplied versions of bills.
- Access: Searchable by word/phrase, bill number. Searches may be limited to those bills receiving floor action, enrolled bills, House or Senate bills, or by sponsor. Browsable lists of bills by type and number.
- Congressional Record Text
- Coverage: 104th Congress, 103rd Congress
- Description: Full text of daily edition of the Congressional Record.
- Access: Searchable by keyword/phrase. Searches may be limited to those debates/speeches in which a certain member of Congress spoke; by date range; and by section of the Record (House, Senate, Extensions of Remarks). Browsable list of daily issues divided by section (House, Senate, Extensions of Remarks, and Daily Digest); each section is preceded by a clickable Table of Contents. Links to the Congressional Record Index.
- Congressional Record Index
- Coverage: 104th Congress, 1st and 2nd sessions; 103rd Congress, 2nd session; cumulative for each session; published every 2 weeks.
- Description: Index to the daily edition of the Congressional Record prepared by staff under the leadership of the Joint Committee on Printing.
- Access: Searchable by index term; browsable by alphabetical ranges. Page references for topics and bill numbers are linked to the THOMAS Congressional Record full text file. Links to searches for major topics -- most commonly searched -- are provided..
- Congressional Advisory Board Reports
- Coverage: Current
- Description: Currently only one document is represented: Report of the National Commission on Economic Growth and Tax Reform, published January 1996
- Access: Browsable by individual sections accessed through a clickable table of contents.
- Constitution of the United States
- Coverage: Current
- Description: Constitution, Bill of Rights (first 10 Constitutional Amendments), and other Amendents (11 - 27). Extracted from data prepared by Gerald Murphy (Cleveland Free-Net - aa300) and Distributed by the Cybercasting Services Division of the National Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN).
- Access: Browsable and searchable by keyword/phrase.
- How Our Laws Are Made
- Coverage: Published in 1989.
- Description: Hypertext version of a 1989 publication of the office of the House of Represenatives' Law Revision Counsel by Edward F. Willett, Jr., Esq. Outlines the background and the numerous steps of our Federal lawmaking process from the origin of an idea for a legislative proposal through its publication as a statute.
- Browsable sequentially through the entire document, or by individual chapters accessed through a clickable table of contents.
CONGRESSIONAL INTERNET SITES: The THOMAS Home Page also provides links to information on other Congressional and legislative support agency servers residing outside of the THOMAS system.
- House of Representatives
- Description: Links to official Internet resources of the United States House of Representatives, including the House World Wide Web, Gopher, Constituent E-Mail System (i.e., electronic addresses for constituents to send e-mail to their Representative), and the House Audit ( Office of Inspector General Financial Statements and
Performance Reports).
- Senate
- Description: Links to official Internet resources of the United States Senate, including the Senate World Wide Web, Gopher, Constituent E-Mail System (i.e., electronic addresses for constituents to send e-mail to their Senators).
- Government Printing Office (GPO)
Description: Links to the Government Printing Office's World Wide Web databases:
- GPO Access - a rich variety of WAIS-searchable legislative and executive branch databases. Most documents are available in both plain text and PDF (Adobe Acrobat) formats.
- Federal Depository Libraries - a searchable list of Federal Depository Libraries where the citizen can obtain the help of professional documents librarians in locating printed and online Federal information.
- Government Information Locator Service - GILS identifes, locates, and describes publicly available Federal information resources, including electronic information resources, to assist the user in obtaining government information.
- General Accounting Office (GAO)
Description: Links to the GAO's World Wide Web databases. (The GAO is the investigative arm of Congress charged with examining matters relating to the receipt and disbursement of public funds. It performs audits and evaluations of Government programs and activities.)
- GAO Reports and Testimony - Abstracts and text of GAO Reports; subject areas include: Health, Defense, Environment, Transportation, Education, International Affairs, Budget, Tax, and many other subject areas involving federal spending.
- GAO Comptroller General Decisions - Decisions issued by the head of the GAO and prepared by the Office of General Counsel in the following areas of Federal law: Appropriations, Bid Protests, Civilian Personnel Pay and Allowances, Military Personnel Pay and Allowances, Household Goods and Freight Loss and Damage, Transportation Rates.
U.S. GOVERNMENT INTERNET RESOURCES from the Library of Congress: The THOMAS Home Page provides links to other Library of Congress electronic government resources, including:
- LOCIS: Telnet access to LOCIS (Library of Congress Information System) databases, including the Library of Congress Catalog, federal legislation (beginning with the 93rd Congress), Copyright Information, Braille and Audio, Organizations, and Foreign Law.
- LCWEB: Web access to Internet indexes on Federal Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches, as well as State and Local government.
HOW OFTEN IS THOMAS UPDATED?
As soon as new files are received from the Government Printing Office, they are indexed and made available for searching. The bill text files are updated several times throughout the day. The Congressional Record files are received once a day, when Congress is in session, usually in the morning.
Information about bills in the Bill Summary & Status files is made available one day after it is entered into the system. Depending on the amount of legislative activity, inputting of the legislative status may lag behind. Bill digests usually are available within 48 hours of the introduction of the bill; likewise, subject terms may take several days to be assigned to bills.
THOMAS USAGE STATISTICS
ABOUT INQUERY
Searching in THOMAS is done under the INQUERY information retrieval system, developed by the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval based at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
INQUERY employs a relevance-ranking algorithm for searching, and displays search results with the most-relevant items appearing first on the results list. Experienced searchers who wish to use Boolean searching may use native INQUERY syntax to override the relevance-ranking default.
To learn more about how INQUERY works in the THOMAS system, choose from among the following topics:
To learn more about INQUERY in general, visit the CIIR's pages: