The In Custodia Legis blog produced by the law librarians of Congress has a nice little shout-out to WashingtonWatch.com in a recent post titled, “THOMAS off of THOMAS.”

THOMAS is the legislative database that the Library of Congress manages. It’s a terrific resource for people who are familiar with the site and the legislative process. We use data collected from THOMAS, and a few other places, to populate this site.

The post talks about a number of different sites that use data from THOMAS to spread knowledge about goings-on in Congress. It’s nice to see folks in the Library of Congress recognize that there are lots of different ways to present and use legislative data. Lots of different sites—including WashingtonWatch.com—can help propagate information about our national legislature out across the land. So we return the shout-out!

The post asks what we would like to see added to THOMAS. Better ways to access THOMAS data is our top-most desire. We currently “scrape” data from the Web pages of the THOMAS system. That is, we download THOMAS pages, then run a computer program that picks out the key information and puts it into our database in a useful form. It would be great to get the data directly, formatted in an organized way. This would save time and prevent errors that creep in through the scraping process.

I’ll have more to say on how data can be made more transparent in the future. Suffice it to say now, thanks THOMAS!