[Disruptive Library Technology Jester]
"One of the hidden gems of the Library of Congress is the Congressional Research Service(CRS). With a staff of about 600 researchers, analysts, and writers, the CRS provides “policy and legal analysis to committees and Members of both the House and Senate, regardless of party affiliation.” It is kind of like a “think tank” for the members of Congress. And an extensive selection of their reports are available from the CRS homepage and—as government publications—are not subject to copyright; any CRS Report may be reproduced and distributed without permission. And they publish a lot of reports. (Read more on their CRS frequently-asked-questions page.)
I remember learning about the CRS in library school, but what got me interested in them again was a post on Mastodon about an Introduction to Cryptocurrency report that they produced. At just 2 pages long, it was a concise yet thorough review of the topic, ranging from how they work to questions of regulation. Useful stuff! And that wasn’t the only useful report I (re-)discovered on the site.
An Automated Syndication Feed
The problem is that no automated RSS/Atom feeds of CRS reports exists. Use your favorite search engine to look for “Congressional Research Service RSS or Atom”; you’ll find a few attempts to gather selected reports or comprehensive archives that stopped functioning years ago. And that is a real shame because these reports are good, taxpayer-funded work that should be more widely known. So I created a syndication feed in Atom:https://feeds.dltj.org/crs.xml
You can subscribe to that in your feed reader to get updates. I’m also working on a Mastodon bot account that you can follow and automated saving of report PDFs in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.."
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