Resource of the Week — StateScape
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

Right off the bat, you need to know that StateScape is a fee-based service that “serves organizations seeking a competitive edge in government relations by providing the fastest and most accurate legislative and regulatory information and analysis service on the market.” But I found a lot of nifty free stuff here that should be quite useful to me in my day job — and you might like to know about it as well.

First of all, the site offers free access to its BillFinder search engine, which allows you to find any state or federal bill by keywords or bill numbers. After filling out a brief registration form, you are taken to a search page that allows you to select a particular state from a menu or search across all 50 states at once. A checkbox allows you to limit your search to “Approved/Enacted Only” bills. In the results list, you can look at the full text of each bill or a summary.

Additionally, StateScape’s Resources page offers a variety of free state-level legislative info:

• Legislature Links: Links to state legislature home pages, bill lookup pages, and member lists for each chamber.
• Session Schedules: Gives start and end dates for regular sessions and special sessions. Indicates which states carry over bills from one year to the next.
• Legislative Control: Indicates the number of legislators from each party by chamber.
• Governors: Who are they? How long are their terms?
• Governor Signing Deadlines: How long does a Governor have to sign legislation?
• Legislative Process: How does a bill become a law?
• Budget Timetable: What’s the budget schedule in each state?
• Effective Dates: When does newly signed legislation become law?
• Meeting Dates: Which state public policy groups are meeting?
• Newspapers: Links to selected state newspapers.

StateScape encourages you to let them know about other state-level information resources you find useful so they can consider including these. Some that we like:

+ Stateline.org — Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and staffed by professional journalists, this constantly updated site offers “timely tips and research material on state policy innovations and trends,” and has individual RSS feeds for each state and policy issue.

+ National Conference of State Legislatures — “(A) bipartisan organization that serves the legislators and staffs of the nation’s 50 states.” It provides information on policy issues, a monthly magazine, and a variety of other publications and reports, including the occasional freebie.

+ USA.gov offers a collection of links to each state’s official home page, U.S. territories and outlying agencies are represented as well. The Library of Congress provides a similar resource.

+ State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States — An ALA Government Documents Round Table-backed wiki that is an ongoing effort to “pull together all publicly accessible state agency databases” in one handy location. This particular site was chosen as a Resource of the Week last August. Various databases from the collection are highlighted in an ongoing blog, and there’s even a fan page on Facebook.

+ The University of Michigan Library Documents Center, one of our favorite fishing holes, has an excellent State Government and Politics section offering a comprehensive list of annotated links to many, many sources of state-level government information. (Note that some resources here are print publications or subscription-based databases restricted to the university community, but you may have access through your local library or workplace.)

Finally, on a semi-related note…just because it’s spring… The Native Plant Information Network (via the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at the University of Texas) provides you with a list of recommended native plants for each state. Use the interactive map or the dropdown menu.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 6:41 am and is filed under Best of DocuTicker, Government Documents and Political Information, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.