Submission + - Permanent links for legislation (sunlightfoundation.com)
dizzymslizzy writes: "Ever try blog about an upcoming bill in Congress but were stopped short when the link to the original piece of legislation expired only a few moments later? Alas, no, longer!
With the prompting from The Sunlight Foundation's Open House Project the US Library Congress announced today that their online database THOMAS will now generate persistent URLs, known as legislative handles for legislation documents.
As Free Government Info said, "it is certainly nice to be able to link to legislation with a persistent link! But it would be much better if one could click to create a link rather than following a 600 word description of how to link on another page."
Still, this is a definite step forward for the Library of Congress and for government transparency. From THOMAS:
With the prompting from The Sunlight Foundation's Open House Project the US Library Congress announced today that their online database THOMAS will now generate persistent URLs, known as legislative handles for legislation documents.
As Free Government Info said, "it is certainly nice to be able to link to legislation with a persistent link! But it would be much better if one could click to create a link rather than following a 600 word description of how to link on another page."
Still, this is a definite step forward for the Library of Congress and for government transparency. From THOMAS:
"Legislative Handles are a new persistent URL service for creating links to legislative documents from the THOMAS web site (http://thomas.loc.gov). With a simple syntax, Legislative Handles make it easy to type in legislative links to bibliographies, reference guides, emails, blogs, or web pages. Legislative Handles, for instance, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110hconres196, are a convenient way to cite legislation.
