Congressional Committee Reports and New Congressional Documents Added to HeinOnline

This article is republished with permission by W.S. Hein. View the original article here.

HeinOnline has added a tremendous amount of content since last September. Twelve new databases have been created and content within key databases has recently been enhanced and even rearranged.

The June 2017 content release greatly expanded the scope of material available in the U.S. Congressional Documents database, which had already experienced exponential growth since its inception in 2007. In fact, this post about the database was published just last year.

Brief Timeline of Key Content/Tool Additions

• Late 2007: The Daily to Bound Locator tool was built, enabling researchers to quickly navigate between the Congressional Record Daily and the official bound version
• January 2012: Congressional Record Daily coverage expanded back to 1980
• February 2012: Congressional hearings added
• April 2014: CRS Reports added
• October 2014: Committee Prints added
• NEW! June 2017: Congressional committee reports and congressional documents, including House and Senate documents and Senate treaty documents, added
• NEW! June 2017: Linking to GPO Authenticated PDFs of the Congressional Record available from 1951-1998. Learn more from this recent blog post.

The chart below illustrates the growth of this database in numbers.

New Content

Recently, a customer suggested that House and Senate reports should be included in the U.S. Congressional Documents database. Previously, these were only available in HeinOnline if a compiled federal legislative history was available on the public law(s) to which the report applied. This led HeinOnline’s production team to the Government Publishing Office’s Federal Digital System (FDSYS), where congressional committee reports and other congressional documents are available. So far, more than 14,000 House and Senate reports have been added to HeinOnline, as well as nearly 3,000 congressional documents, which include House and Senate documents and Senate Treaty Documents. All content is now indexed and easy to find in HeinOnline’s user-friendly interface.

In addition to adding the content, Quick Finder tools were built for each document type.

As a result of this content addition, citations for these congressional reports and documents will now be hyperlinked throughout HeinOnline. Hyperlinked citations are highlighted in blue. For example, this Congressional Record Daily Edition page links to H. Rept. 111-491.

These documents will also now be easier to find using the main search bar from the HeinOnline welcome page. For instance, enter this same citation in quotation marks (“H. Rept. 111-491”) and the first search result will be the desired House Report.

Soon, all House and Senate reports which are currently located inside compiled federal legislative histories (but not already included in the batch from FDSYS) will be added. This will provide a central location from which to search and browse for these documents, which are excellent for determining legislative intent of public laws.

This collection currently contains 108,264 titles and more than 22.4 million pages and it will continue to grow as we locate additional material, including hearings, committee reports, committee prints, CRS reports, and other congressional documents.