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In the Spirit of Jefferson
THOMAS Delivers Latest Legislative Infomation

By YVONNE FRENCH

The Library's systems engineering manager got an unexpected call at home the night of Dec. 15 from the Deputy Librarian.

Could the Information Technology Services (ITS) department put all the congressional bills, e-mail addresses and information from the Congressional Record on a World Wide Web server in time for the opening of the 104th Congress on Jan. 4?

"Who is this really?" asked Judith Stork-Kittleman, who was already managing her departmental budget, personnel and training in addition to serving as line manager for systems engineering in ITS.

But Hiram Davis, the Deputy Librarian, told her the initiative, which would make congressional information available for free, came from the new congressional leadership. He added that he had already cleared the top-priority assignment with her boss.

The next day, Ms. Stork-Kittleman and a team of skilled programmers in ITS, including Dean Wilder, Phillip Thomas, Cheryl Graunke, Tom Littlejohn, Susan Thomas and Maryle Ashley, got to work. "The first few days, we spent our time trying to figure out what we could do in such a short period. Then we got down to business." That was Christmas day, and they had only 10 days left to create the THOMAS Web server, which was to include hypertext links to volumes of information.

The team spent the holidays working 18-hour shifts in a rabbit warren of computer cubicles, making frequent trips to Ms. Stork- Kittleman's office, where two 3-pound cans of coffee kept a coffee maker busy.

"I don't think any of us could have put in the energy and time if we didn't think it was necessary," said Ms. Stork-Kittleman. "Because the information is legislative and comes from Congress, it seemed to us an important step when Congress said, 'We want to give this information to the people free of charge.'"

THOMAS, named for Thomas Jefferson, the Library's spiritual founder, is stored on about 10 gigabytes of magnetic disk space. The disks occupy about as much space as a bread box but have the capacity of more than 50 standard PC hard drives.

After feverish work by the THOMAS team, the system was ready for the opening of the 104th session of Congress on Jan. 4, but wasn't announced until the next day, by Dr. Billington and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who said it would change "the balance of power in America toward the citizens and out of the Beltway."

So "we got a one-day reprieve," Ms. Stork-Kittleman says. In addition to the Librarian and Chief of Staff Suzanne Thorin, Ms. Stork-Kittleman has been taped for four TV news shows and interviewed by reporters from countless newspapers. The pile of clippings on her desk is more than an inch thick.

In part because of that publicity, 169,000 individual users had tapped into THOMAS by early May, together racking up an average of about 30,000 transactions, or file transfers, every day. The users have sent THOMAS about 1,500 e-mail messages, most of them positive or offering suggestions for improvements. Their input has helped the system change and grow.

At first THOMAS listed only House and Senate bills from the 103rd Congress and, as they were introduced, the 104th. It also provided links to the House and C-SPAN gophers and the e-mail addresses of members of Congress. "We had a list of House member e- mail addresses in raw ASCII and it didn't look pretty," said Ms. Stork-Kittleman. A user downloaded the list, reformatted it and e- mailed the revised version back to THOMAS.

A link to the Senate gopher was soon added, and the Library recently added "hot bills," a category that shows bills that get a lot of attention in Congress. They are listed by title, topic and bill number.

"After the bombing in Oklahoma City, we were getting a lot of searches on 'Oklahoma City,' 'terrorist' and 'antiterrorist,' and we thought there must be a way to help people quickly find things that are coming up in Congress," Ms. Stork-Kittleman said.

Also recently added was the Congressional Record index for the 104th Congress.

In the first weeks of the 5-month-old system, users helped debug THOMAS, whose bill titles initially appeared jumbled because of embedded coding in the electronic documents, which the Library buys from the Government Printing Office (GPO) for about $10,000 a year. Now most of the title problems have been worked out, but the team is still working on how to format tabular material. And this summer, team members plan to continue to refine the programs so THOMAS can recognize things such as dates and bill numbers, a task that is more complicated than it sounds, Ms. Stork-Kittleman said.

"For example, there are a lot of ways people can write a date. We write the programs so they accept all the different ways, like March 3, 3/3 and Mar. 3," she said. "Just when we think we've thought of every possible way, they throw another one at us."

Besides user input, another big help in setting up THOMAS was ITS's close relationship with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where programmers at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval created Inquery, a software tool kit for building full-text retrieval applications that was used to create THOMAS. Mr. Wilder, the lead programmer for THOMAS, works with the Amherst programmers regularly. "They fixed bugs and added features based on what we needed. They really were a partner," he said.

Future enhancements will include the Bill Digest files. The files are summaries and chronologies of legislation compiled by the Library's Congressional Research Service.

The team would also like to add a listing of all public laws to THOMAS. "Bills often modify a subparagraph of a public law. It would be more meaningful if we could go and look up the laws," Ms. Stork-Kittleman said. Two more things are on the wish list: member's voting records and committee reports and hearing transcripts.

It seems that the THOMAS team will have some time to install those features, unlike the initial push to inaugurate THOMAS in time for the opening of the current session of Congress.

"I seriously doubt we would have made this much progress if we all didn't believe that it is simply the right thing to do," Ms. Stork-Kittleman said.

Back to June 12, 1995 - Vol 54, No.12

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