Critics pan plan to publish congressional research
Schuman laid out his concerns Thursday in a blog post co-authored with R Street Institute Vice President Kevin Kosar — a former CRS researcher — and govTrack.us founder Josh Tauberer. They based their criticism on a May Library of Congress implementation plan, which they also released on the website legbranch.com.
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The authors of the legbranch.com critique run everycrsreport.com, a website that aims to publish all current CRS reports online. But they maintain the public would be better served if the government published its own work, thus ensuring its timeliness and authenticity.
The Library of Congress plan, “does not comport with the law or best practices for creating websites and is unusually expensive,” they wrote. By contrast, their own collection of 14,000 reports cost about $20,000, the group says.
They also criticized the Library of Congress plans to publish the reports only as PDF files — rather than in both HTML and PDF formats — making them harder to access on mobile devices and potentially inaccessible to people with visual impairments. The plan also apparently ignores a directive to publish a separate index of all the reports published by CRS, they said, which would make it easier for laypeople to see all the available documents at once.
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