How to find CRS Reports

1. What is CRS? The Congressional Research Service is the public policy research arm of the United States Congress. As a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, CRS works exclusively and directly for Members of Congress, their Committees and staff on a confidential, nonpartisan basis.
   
   
2. What is a CRS report? CRS publishes a variety of document types and the most commonly requested are the reports. A report seeks to define an issue in a legislative context, either in a short format, "Short Reports (RS)", and is less than seven pages in length, or a long format, "Long Reports (RL)" and may be an extensive study. For a comprehensive introduction to CRS reports, please see "CRS Reports" by Stephen Young. CRS does not post its publications directly online, so the public must rely upon other organizations to make these documents available electronically.
   
   
3. How to link to open sources:
   
   
   • Open CRS Network: Sponsored by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), the Open CRS Network is the most comprehensive collection of CRS reports to date, offering search capability to access more than 3,300 reports as well as thousands of updates of those reports. It combines, but is not limited to, smaller CRS report collections sponsored by the following organizations: National Council for Science and the Environment, Federation of American Scientists, Thurgood Marshall Law Library/University of Maryland School of Law, and the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. To view any of these smaller collections individually, please see:
     
     
     • National Council for Science and the Environment (1990 - present): Environmental and related topics accessible by a topic directory, quick and advanced search tools.
       
       
     • Federation of American Scientists (FAS): Focuses upon national security, intelligence, foreign policy and homeland security.
       
       
     • Thurgood Marshall Law Library, University of Maryland School of Law (1993 - present): Features the subject areas of homeland security/terrorism and health law and policy. While the site does not provide a search option, it gives the researcher the means to browse the report collection by title, subject, date, order code and alphabetical order.
     
     
     
   • U.S. Department of State: (1999 - present). This site covers a variety of topics and the reports are organized in chronological order. While coverage is fairly extensive for more recent reports from the last year or so, coverage for 1999 and 2000 is quite limited. The site does not offer a search feature specific to the reports, so the only way to search is to use the search engine for the entire State Department web site.
     
     
   • University of North Texas Libraries: Researchers have the ability to search by keyword, title, author, subject, and report number, and browse by a wide variety of subjects.
     
     
   • IP Mall at Franklin Pierce Law Center (1993 - present): Strong collection of newer reports concerning intellectual property, cyberlaw, and electronic commerce. Organized by date.
     
     
   • Sources with limited collections:
     
     
     • Memory Hole (mid-1990’s - present): One of the earlier efforts to make CRS reports available to the public online.
       
       
     • U.S. Embassy in Rome, Italy: Miscellaneous topics.
       
       
     • Law Librarians' Society of Washington, DC (late 90s - present): Collection of links to CRS reports on Congress and its procedures.
       
       
     • House CRS Reports: Focus on legislative process in the House of Representatives and the budget process for Congress as a whole.