1.1: House and Senate Membership

There should be one and only one authoritative, well-published source of information about House and Senate membership.

Other Information:

It would seem simple enough to publish data about who holds office in the House of Representatives and Senate, and it is. There are problems with the way the data is published, though, which the House and Senate could easily remedy. On the positive side -- and this is not to be discounted -- there is a thing called the "Biographical Directory of the United States Congress," a compendium of information about all present and former members of the U.S. Congress (as well as the Continental Congress), including delegates and resident commissioners. The "Bioguide" website at bioguide.congress.gov is a great resource for searching out historical information. But there is little sign that Bioguide is Congress's repository of record, and it is little known by users, giving it lower authority marks than it should have. Some look to the House and Senate websites and beta. congress.gov for information about federal representatives, splitting authority among websites, rather than one established and agreed upon resource. Bioguide scores highly on availability -- we know of no problems with up-time or completeness (though it could use quicker updating when new members are elected). Bioguide is not structured for discoverability, though. Most people have not seen it, because search engines are not finding it. Bioguide does a good thing in terms of machine readability, though. It assigns a unique ID to each of the people in its database. This is the first, basic step in making data useful for computers, and the Bioguide ID should probably be the standard for machine identification of elected officials wherever they are referred to in data. Unfortunately, the biographical content in Bioguide is not machine-readable. As noted above, the other ways of learning about House and Senate membership are ad hoc. The Government Printing Office has a "Guide to House and Senate Members" at http://memberguide.gpo.gov/ that duplicates information found elsewhere. The House website presents a list of members along with district information, party affiliation, and so on, in HTML format (http:// www.house.gov/representatives/), and beta. congress.gov does as well (http://beta.con gress.gov/members/). Someone who wants a complete dataset must collect data from these sources using a computer program to scrape the data and through manual curation. The HTML presentations do not break out key information in ways useful for computers. The Senate membership page,25 on the other hand, includes a link to an XML representation that is machine readable. That is the reason why the Senate scores so well compared to the House. Much more information about our representatives flows to the public via representatives' individual websites. These are nonauthoritative websites that search engine spidering combines to use as a record of the Congress's membership. They are available and discoverable, again because of that prime house.gov and senate.gov real estate. But they only reveal data about the membership of Congress incidentally to communicating the press releases, photos, and announcements that representatives want to have online. It is a narrow point, but there should be one and only one authoritative, well-published source of information about House and Senate membership from which all others flow. The variety of sources that exist combine to give Congress pretty good grades on publishing information about who represents Americans in Washington, but improving in this area is a simple matter of coordinated House and Senate efforts.

Stakeholder(s):

• U.S. House of Representatives
  •  (Performer)


• U.S. Senate
  •  (Performer)

Indicator(s):

Indicator:1

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