Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports

Louise shared an article “CSR Reports” by Stephen Young and asked for recommendations of best sites. I volunteered to write them on the blog so I can get acquainted with these resources. But it is hard to pick up “best sites”. Just F.Y.I.

About CRS

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the non-partisan public policy research arm of the Congress. It provides high quality and analysis for members of Congress in the form of CRS reports: Long Report (RL), Short Reports (RS), Appropriations Reports (A), Issue Briefs (IB), Briefing Books (BB), and Research Memo (RM).

For many years, these reports were only available through commercial subscriptions or by contacting individual members of Congress. There have been debates for years on whether CRS reports should be available to the public. The most recent news includes CRS Reports: Information, Please, and a letter from the Director of the Congressional Research Service. Today, some CRS reports are available on the Internet. Most of them are in PDF files. Some files are DOCs, HTMLs, and scanned reports.

1. I would recommend the following two sites which are relatively large, searchable collections.

Open CRS Network is a project of the Center for Democracy & Technology. As of March 30, 2007, it provides searching for 11811 reports from 1990 to date. Users may search for reports, browse featured collections, and receive updates via RSS. The site provides all versions of the reports. It provides access to previously acquired reports from the Federal of American Scientists CRS Archive, National Council for Science and the Environment, and Thurgood Marshall Law Library, and etc.

Congressional Research Service Reports by the University of North Texas Libraries (UNTL) started in June 2005. Reports (1990 to present) cover a variety of topics. Many CRS reports are updated on a regular basis, and this site includes all versions of the reports that could be located. Users have the ability to search keyword, title, author, subject, and report number, and browse the collection by subject.

Both collections cover a variety of topics, include reports back to 1990, and provide all versions of the reports. Open CRS searches better for all versions of a report. The UNTL collection provides better search functionality, and subject browsing.

2. The following sites provide selected CRS reports on specific subjects. Some sites simply list reports for browsing.

1)Agriculture & Issues: National Agricultural Law Center
2)Congress & its procedures: Law Librarians' Society of Washington, DC
3)Environmental law & policies: National Council for Science and the Environment
4) First Amendment issues: US Congress, House, Rules Committee
5) Foreign relations, homeland security, military, national security & terrorism: Air War College, U.S. Embassy in Italy, Thurgood Marshall Law Library, GlobalSecurity.org,
U.S. State Department
6) Intellectual property, cyberlaw & e-commerce: Franklin Pierce Law Center

3. Zfacts.com

Zfacts is a Google-powered “CRS finder”. It looks into every CRS report on the web and only into CRS reports.

4. Google

You can always search in Google by entering the title or number of the report as a query and if possible limit the query to just PDF files (e.g., on Google simply type “filetype:.pdf” after the query or use the advanced searching feature).