The Law Library recently purchased a new product: ProQuest Legislative Insight. It gathers all major legislative history documents for enacted legislation going back to the 1960s, with more on the way. It also provides an easy-to-use search interface, with color-coded results. It’s not cutting-edge visualization, but it’s a helpful cue when you are sorting through a long list of legislative history documents.
Legislative Insight also aims to provide a broader context for legislative history research. It has general background information, including the “historical context” for each Congress. And it provides a “Legislative Process” view that shows you a graphical map of the legislative process on the side, so that you can see where each document was produced as a bill wound its way through Congress. To get to that view, click the “Legislative Process” link at the top of a Legislative History result.
Note that the “Legislative Process” view hides some related legislative history documents (like CRS reports and committee prints), perhaps because those documents are not explicitly linked to a particular bill.
To look at a sample legislative history–one that includes related documents–try the Legislative History for the Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004, Pub. L. No. 108-311.