Thursday, December 18, 2008

Comparison of Legislative Resources on GPO Access and Selected Government and Non-Government Web Sites
"The goal of this study is to compare legislative information available on GPO Access to that available on selected, relevant Government Web sites and non-Government sites. This analysis compares two separate source bases of Government information to what currently resides on GPO Access. The first includes legislative resources available on external, free Government sites that provide resources to the public at no cost. The second includes legislative resources available on non-Government, commercial, fee-based Web sites...

The comparative analysis yielded the following key findings:
• GPO Access has the largest total number of legislative resources among those evaluated.
• All Government Web sites, with the exception of GPO Access, utilize at least some external content by linking to other Web sites.
• On House.gov and Senate.gov, most of the legislative resources link to other Web sites to supplement their information.
• House.gov and Senate.gov mostly link to GPO Access rather than THOMAS to supplement their information, and in some cases link to both external services.
• THOMAS links to House.gov for a very small amount of resources.
• The scope (number of years covered) of most resources on GPO Access is exceeded by the following:
o House.gov
o THOMAS
o Lexis-Nexis
o HeinOnline
o CQ.com

• Non-Government Web sites possess their own content, but in a very small number of cases will supplement that information with a link to GPO Access, and in one case, a link to a Library of Congress site.
• Lexis-Nexis, CQ.com, Senate.gov, and THOMAS offer a significant amount of additional legislative resources and features not offered on GPO Access."

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