THOMAS

» see thomas.loc.gov as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The 104th Congress convened on 4 January 1995. The next day the Library of Congress put up a website named for Thomas Jefferson, and from then on the text of a federal bill was a URL anybody could open. Before that, following legislation in progress meant a commercial subscription service or a trip to a depository library, which in practice meant that lobbyists knew what was in a bill and voters did not.

THOMAS held bills and resolutions, each with its text and its voting record, alongside the Congressional Record and its daily digest. Presidential nominations and treaties were on there too. It was not a pretty site: frames and blue links, with tables of bill numbers that looked much the same in 2014 as they had in 1998. What it had instead of design was completeness, which for a reference source is the only feature that matters.

On 28 April 2016 the Library announced the end date, and on 5 July 2016 the site went off. The Law Library's own blog ran the announcement under a post that paired it with a screenshot of the 1995 homepage, called the shutdown the THOMAS Ending Point, and noted that the Library was retiring a twenty-one year old website.

~ the case file ~

~ what was actually on it ~

The useful thing about THOMAS was the status tracking. A bill is not a document so much as a process, and the site recorded every action taken on one, from the referral to committee down to the day it was enrolled. That is how you learned that the interesting part of American legislating happens in the gaps between those lines, and how a reporter or a staffer found out at 2am that a provision had been attached to something else entirely.

It went mobile improbably early. In 1999 Vice President Al Gore asked for THOMAS access on the Palm VII, and a Palo Alto company called Workspot shipped it that year, which makes it a fair candidate for the first legislative app on a handheld. The Library kept adding to the site for another decade after that, but the foundation stayed what it had been built on in 1994.

~ four years of overlap ~

Congress.gov went up on 19 September 2012, and the Library said plainly at the time that the launch marked the first public announcement of the eventual end of THOMAS. The replacement spent two years in beta, shipping enhancements roughly every quarter, and lost the beta label in September 2014. Only then did the retirement date get set.

Most of that migration was about old records rather than new features. The Congressional Record for the 101st through 103rd Congresses sat on THOMAS and not on Congress.gov, which starts at the 104th, and commenters on the Library's announcement post spent the thread asking what would happen to pre-1995 bill summaries. The Library archived the THOMAS content and published the older Record before switching the site off.

~ reading somebody else's parliament ~

I have never had a reason to look up a US bill's committee status, and the Turkish version of the problem is a different shape: the TBMM site has carried bill texts for years, but nobody I knew treated a legislature's own website as something you browse. THOMAS got there in 1995, which is the part worth marking. A government published its working papers at an address that did not change for twenty-one years, and the site stayed ugly for all of them.

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