Short notes and thoughts on Congress.gov webinar

I watched this live webinar from the Law Library of Congress on June 11, 2026. Topic was the congress.gov website. Here are some of my notes from the event, mainly for me to look back later, and some small random thoughts. 

Webinar notes: 

• Overview of the website. 
• The search allows for quotation marks on phrases. 
• For things like keeping track of a committee, email alerts are an option, for example, to get a committee's schedule. 
• You can also search for CRS (Congressional Research Service) reports on the website. Before, you had to use FAS (Federation of American Scientists), where they kept a list (apparently no longer there) or Open CRS, which is no longer there either. Those were the days. Now they are in one place in congress.gov. I've often encouraged students where they can to use CRS reports in their research assignments if they find a relevant one. 
• U.S. Constitution Annotated. This includes the Constitution with legal analysis. Note additional features offered.
• Use the Support button (upper right on top) then click on Browse Help Center, then scroll a bit down to Collections. This allows you to see what a specific resource collection may cover and contain. 
• Also under Support, there is a Glossary for federal terms, in case you need them. 
• Under Support you can also find Ask a Law Librarian, if you need help search help, or finding a resource, or an answer from a librarian. 
• In addition to finding members of Congress from the main website, you can find them under Support. Just browse Help Center then Collections.  
• See also and use the Advanced Search for precise and/or specific searches. Use the Query Builder when you have few but specific details of your search. 
• See also Search Tools (on top of main page, next to the Support link). This tells you what tools, wildcards, so on you can use on the search. This is a detail I also encourage my students to do, though I am sure a lot of them ignore it anyhow. When it comes to a database, especially one you may be using often, take a moment to check the Help/Tools (or whatever similar name) section to see what wildcards and other search tips it offers. Knowing things like wildcards (also known as truncation of terms) can save you some time and make your searching better, but you got to put in a little time to learn the tricks. 
• See also More Options under the main search bar for some quick search options. It is a small pull down menu that opens filters and other limiters you may find useful. 
• If you make a congress.gov account, you can save searches and do email alerts. When they are available. There is a note today saying "accounts are temporarily unavailable" as of this post, and I do hope it is a temporary thing. 
• Using filters in searches as much as possible is helpful to narrow a search and make it more specific.  

 

Side notes: 

This is the the kind of thing that regular people need to know and use to see what the federal government does. Librarians certainly need to know this in order to help their patrons wanting information on the federal government, especially Congress and legislation. 

We don't get many U.S. government questions here often, but we do get one now and then. At times I do wonder what they teach in political science when it comes to the federal government. 

At times I also wonder how many librarians show interest in this kind of stuff. I do, and I try my best to keep up my reference skills and knowledge base, but some colleagues could not care less. I've been told that if they get that kind of question, they can always send it to me. And while I do not mind, I think other reference librarians in general need to nurture this kind of knowledge too. 

As I wrap up this post, the thought occurs to me I am sure a few researchers, and more than a few librarians who should know better, would be happy to ask an AI Slop machine to look up the kind of information a site like congress.gov would offer. It is a sad reality, but that is a thought for another time. 

 

  

Dialectical notebook and some short thoughts on privilege

A note to remember a small exercise a professor showed their students in class. This happened prior to a library instruction session; instructor had some additional class activities to do before I did my part. They write to three categories, three lists: 

• Privileges I have
• Privileges I lack
• Benefits

 

Idea is students make their list, then pass their notebook around and others comment on what they wrote. After that, teacher discusses some of their lists and comments with the class. 

I have some time, so I will try to write my lists:

•  Privileges I have: 
• Being male. 
• Being Caucasian. 
• A good education: private schooling as a child and youth, relatively good universities. 
• Stable family. Many of my peers had divorced parents. 
• Having enough and a bit more. 
• Access to certain resources such as Internet, good libraries, books, water, food.  
• Privileges I lack: 
• Privilege of money. I am not wealthy, but I have enough. Here I mean not having the ability to just wave money around and make problems vanish or seriously minimize problems. 
• Health. This may be mixed. While I do have some health issues, I suppose I could be in worse shape, so maybe this is more a privilege I have. However, I am, like many folks, one medical catastrophe away from ruin, see above idea of money privilege I lack.  
• Second class US citizenship being Puerto Rican. This is a bit more a political thing, what I call being a colonial. It does bring in some degree of discrimination in the U.S.  
• Benefits: 
• Got a decent job. On a side note, the job provides mostly decent health care plan (it does the job for now). 
• A roof over the head. 
• Food on the table.  

I am sure there may be other privileges I have that I cannot recall, and a few that I lack that do not occur to me at the moment. This is just a short quick exercise just as the students did in the class.