Once again I am stealing shamelessly from Slashdot…
When I first arrived in Washington, DC to attend university, I would see many of my classmates who had internships on the Hill carrying around reports with “CRS” on the cover. It was then that I first discovered the Congressional Research Service, an organization with a $100 million budget to support the research requirements of members of Congress.
Reports published by the CRS enter into the public domain once released by a member of Congress. A number of libraries have been building collections of these reports. The wonderful folks at the Center for Democracy & Technology have been kind enough to create a searchable compendium of these reports as part of the Open CRS project.
CRS reports provide some great background for researchers, particularly if they’re trying to get a handle on a new subject area or get a sense of what facts legislators are reading. The quality of the reports I’ve been looking at today might not necessarily be on par with industry-specific analysts, but that is mostly because the reports are clearly written for lay audiences such as legislators and their staff. One really great aspect of the reports I am discovering is the citations, which are often freely available deep web sources.
The Open CRS site is also complete with its own RSS feed, a very excellent touch.
