Library of Congress Transition from Thomas.gov to Congress.gov

The Library of Congress is developing a new portal site for researching the data generated out of the U.S. Congress.

Beta version of Congress.gov web site

You still can use Thomas.gov to find information on a bill or piece of legislation. In about a year's time the new Congress.gov site will take over. The new site will make it easier to find bills, research legislation, and you will be able to access data over mobile devices.

One of the things that will be easier is getting a better understanding of how congress works. You should check out the legislative page that contains text and video that brings a bit of clarity about the process.

National Archives 1940 Census Site Is Live

I love it when history, technology and crowd sourcing come together. What do you do when you have 3 million plus pages of census documents that need to be entered into a database?

http://1940census.archives.gov

You ask for help. 160,000 people volunteered and within five months The 1940 Census is available for free from a number of partner web sites in addition to the National Archives.



This is a short video created by the National Archives explaining how they converted microfilm to a digital format and how to use the enumeration district numbers.  For those of you in the digital technician program pay close attention toward the end of the video.

At the National Archives site you can get a primer on how to do a census search, the vocabulary you need to understand and more. There is even a blank 1940 Census form for your perusal.

You can get much of the information from proprietary sites like Archive.com,  Family Search.org, or access to ProQuest.

This is a great opportunity to find that rascal of a relative or to get a better sense of how people functioned in the the time between the Great Depression and World War 2.