Legislative Resources Online: How Does GPO Access Measure Up to Other Government Websites and Fee-Based Websites?

The GPO has conducted a comparison of legislative information available on GPO Access to that available on selected, relevant Government Web sites and non-Government sites. This analysis compares two separate source bases of Government information to what currently resides on GPO Access. The first includes legislative resources available on external, free Government sites that provide resources to the public at no cost. The second includes legislative resources available on non-Government, commercial, fee-based Web sites.

Analyses and comparisons were executed on four Government Web sites including GPO Access, the House of Representatives Web site, the Senate Web site, and THOMAS. The commercial, fee-based Internet services evaluated were CQ.com, HeinOnline, Lexis-Nexis Congressional, and Westlaw.

Key findings include:

• GPO Access has the largest total number of legislative resources among those evaluated.
• All Government Web sites, with the exception of GPO Access, utilize at least some external content by linking to other Web sites.
• On House.gov and Senate.gov, most of the legislative resources link to other Web sites to supplement their information.
• House.gov and Senate.gov mostly link to GPO Access rather than THOMAS to supplement their information, and in some cases link to both external services.
• THOMAS links to House.gov for a very small amount of resources.
• The scope (number of years covered) of most resources on GPO Access is exceeded by the following: House.gov, THOMAS, Lexis-Nexis, HeinOnline and CQ.com
• Non-Government Web sites possess their own content, but in a very small number of cases will supplement that information with a link to GPO Access, and in one case, a link to a Library of Congress site.
• Lexis-Nexis, CQ.com, Senate.gov, and THOMAS offer a significant amount of additional legislative resources and features not offered on GPO Access.

Cleck out the Report's Executive Summary and these two tables: (1) Comparison of Legislative Resources: Scope of GPO Access and Government Web Sites and (2) Comparison of Legislative Resources: Scope of GPO Access and Non-Government Web Site. [JH]