Saturday, November 26, 2005

What RSS Feeds Can Do For You, part 3

Another important way that RSS feeds can help you is by monitoring government information. Federal agencies make news and announcements, product recalls, proposed regulations, reports, statistics, and other information available through hundreds of feeds. See FirstGov's RSS Library, which groups government feeds into the following categories:

  • Agriculture and Energy
  • Business and Economics
  • Consumer
  • Cyber Security
  • Data and Statistics
  • Education
  • Federal Personnel
  • Forest
  • Health
  • International Relations
  • Military
  • Science

The government is not the only source of feeds for federal government information. Listings of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, with links to the full text of the decisions, are available via feeds from Cornell's Legal Information Institute. There are feeds for today's decisions and recent decisions. For some reason these feeds have not been well publicized, but they appear to still be current. Another good source of current Supreme Court information is the SCOTUSblog, which provides news, commentary, and links to U.S. Supreme Court decisions and related documents via its RSS feed.

GovTrack is a non-governmental web service that tracks legislation and Congressional activity. To subscribe to a feed for an individual person, bill, subject term, or committee, search or browse to the appropriate page, click on the "RSS or Atom feed" link in the Monitor box (see example below), and follow the instructions in the pop-up window. (Right-clicking on the link does not work.) To learn more about GovTrack, including how to receive email updates or subscribe to a single feed of all your "tracked events," see Research Tip: GovTrack.us.

example of GovTrack Monitor box

Stay tuned for more on what RSS Feeds can do for you, including state government information and practice-area resources. For previous entries in this series, see part 1, part 2, and Subscribing to RSS Feeds.

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