Waldo Jaquith of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center has made available for bulk download, in HTML format, all Virginia legislative bills introduced from 2006 through 2012, at Richmond Sunlight, the free-access-to-law and transparency service for Virginia.
The announcement of this new feature says:
New feature: Text of all bills available for download…unfortunately, as screen-scraped HTML. That’s all we’ve got!
For more information, please contact Waldo or Richmond Sunlight.
HT @richmond_sun.
Tags: Bulk access to legal documents, Bulk access to legal information, Bulk access to legislation, Bulk access to legislative data, Free access to law, Legislative bills, Legislative information systems, Open legal government data, Open legislative data, Public access to legal information, Richmond Sunlight, Waldo Jaquith
March 5, 2012 at 6:49 pm |
To expand on the limited space of a tweet, I want to point out that Virginia only provides bills as HTML, on their website (e.g. HB1). There’s no XML, SGML, etc. I scrape all of the bills out a dozen times a day (using bill status data to only scrape new or amended bills), and store the HTML, minus HTML header and container data. The resulting output, wholly un-messed-around-with, is what I’m providing here.
Obviously, what would be a lot better is providing XML, or at least much prettier HTML, but it’s a start!