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Obtaining CRS Reports Online

By Lauren Schroeder
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is a federal government department within the Library of Congress. It serves members of Congress through providing analysis and research that is comprehensive and designed to be unbiased and nonpartisan. This information, including reports, is given to the members only, and is not made directly available to the public.

The information contained in CRS reports can be very useful for legal research, but only a fraction of the number of reports produced have been released. One site that is designed to make it easier to search for the publicly-available reports is Open CRS.

Open CRS was created by the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit organization that wants to keep the Internet as open and free as possible. It provides a single search point for collections of CRS reports that have been gathered by six different organizations. When you conduct a search, the record for each report contains the report's order code, title and date, a summary, a link to download it in PDF, and a listing of all available versions of the report (in case it was modified or updated).

The site also allows you to get updates when new reports are added, either through Twitter, a mailing list, or RSS.

Check it out!
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