Post in Permanent links announced on THOMAS

Oct 09 18:40 UTC

Subject: 	[openhouseproject] permanent links announced on THOMAS
Date: 	Thu, 9 Oct 2008 14:33:18 -0400
From: 	John Wonderlich <johnwonderlich@gmail.com>
Reply-To: 	<email obscured>
To: 	<email obscured>

THOMAS Publishes Permanent Links (Another Recommendation Realized)
<http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/2008/10/09/thomas-publishes-permanent-links-another-recommendation-realized/>

Fulfilling one of the recommendations of the Open House Project report
<http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/the-open-house-project-report/3-legislation-database/>,
The Library of Congress has published on their THOMAS web page
directions <http://thomas.loc.gov/home/handles/help.html> for creating
permanent links.

From our report:

    We also recommend that:

    THOMAS provide permanent links to all documents, in an obvious way,
    to enable Web researchers to directly refer to these documents

From THOMAS <http://thomas.loc.gov/home/handles/help.html>:

    Legislative Handles are a new persistent URL service for creating
    links to legislative documents from the THOMAS web site
    (http://thomas.loc.gov). With a simple syntax, Legislative Handles
    make it easy to type in legislative links to bibliographies,
    reference guides, emails, blogs, or web pages. Legislative Handles,
    for instance,
    http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110hconres196, are a
    convenient way to cite legislation.

This matters because linking is one of the most basic components of
online dialog. Without citations and primary sources, commentary and
analysis are just opinion and rumor.

The "Handles" allow a simple procedure for linking to specific
legislation, without that link expiring, as often happens if you create
a link to a bill's page accessed through a search.

This is a great first step toward modernizing THOMAS. We'd love to see
additional changes, like access to bulk legislative data, or permanent
links automatically created within bill pages. As it stands now,
however, it's great that THOMAS is recognizing the needs of its users,
and helping the public create permanent links to legislation is
long-awaited first step towards doing just that.

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