Bill Tracing Assignment

GOVERNMENT INFORMATION: Bill Tracing Assignment

Select a bill related to: (see Significant Ecological/Environmental Legislation, mid-19th to late 20th Centuries Of Interest to Archivists, Curators, and Librarians)
Consult volumes of the Statutes at Large to identify these and read the required WebPages at http://thomas.loc.gov/home/lawsmade.toc.html.
See also, Nancy Johnson's Sources of Complied Legislative Histories (AALL loose-leaf notebook in Law Library), Goehlert and Martin's Congress and Law-Making (ABC-Clio, 1990), Richard J. McKinney and Ellen A. Sweet's Federal Legislative History Research: A Practitioner's Guide to Compilation and Sifting for Legislative Intent (Washington, DC: Law Librarian's Society of Washington, DC, 2005), or Peggy Garvin's Real World Research Skills: An Introduction to Factual, International, Judicial, Legislative and Regulatory Research (Alexandria, VA: TheCapitol.Net, 2006)..
Read the following article that is on reserve in the lab: "A State Transition Model of U.S. Congressional Information," by John Richardson and Margaret R. Zarnosky in the Journal of Government Information 21 (1994): 25-35 for specific information about the more than forty tools used in tracing federal legislation.
Of course, your textbook ought to be read for background information as well.
Create a parallel (i.e., side-by-side) chronology of significant events during the passage of this bill in the House and Senate. Use the flowchart in JGI as a model or Alan Green's Gavel to Gavel: A Guide to the Televised Proceedings of Congress (Washington, DC: Benton Foundation, 1986).
Create a systematic, rigorous bibliography of documents related to its passage. Use Chicago's Manual of Style and the CIS Guide to Citing or the Lexis/Nexis guide. Succinctly annotate, in one or two sentences, these documents indicating which tools were useful in finding them.
Most importantly (because the bill tracing is only a case study and not the goal of this assignment), write a scholarly introductory narrative section which discusses the tools and the process evaluatively.
Be sure to address these questions: 1) which is the single most valuable index or bibliography? 2) As a group, are governmental or non-governmental tools more useful? 3) What needs to be improved?

GRADING: Proper bibliographic style will be checked. Statistical analysis will be rewarded (e.g., you could run statistical correlations with Richardson and Zarnosky's scoring of reference sources or between group analysis of government and non-governmental titles). Conclusions and recommendations will be recognized.