In Custodia Legis: “Continuing our series on modernizing the legislative data exchange behind Congress.gov, we are going to look at the next phase of the project – modernizing the exchange of Senate measures and amendments data. The Legislation collection is comprised of bills and resolutions, along with associated actions (including Action Codes), titles, sponsors, cosponsors, and committee-related activity. Legislation text is a separate collection on Congress.gov. When we began the process of modernizing the legislative data exchange, we worked closely with colleagues in the Secretary of the Senate and the Senate Sergeant at Arms. The complexities of legislation moving through the chambers had to be considered. To assist with this, testing scenarios were developed to ensure that action codes, committee referrals, amendments associated with Senate measures, cosponsor data, and action text were rendered properly in Congress.gov. We devoted considerable efforts to ensuring that updates to legislation were displayed properly, as well. With these vital elements in mind, we decided to utilize unique identifiers in the modernized data. Unique identifiers in the data exchange support specific and precise updates as measures or amendments move through the legislative process. We completed several rounds of testing to confirm that more unique scenarios were accounted for within the new data exchange. A variety of cases were presented to colleagues in the Senate, and their feedback and knowledge were essential in refining the modernized data exchange. You can search current Congress collection items, metadata, and full-text documents from the search bar by entering your search terms in the search entry box and pressing Enter on your keyboard or clicking the magnifying glass icon. By typing into the search bar, you are given the option to search only in the legislation collection. Bills may be searched by number or keyword from the search bar, search form, or Advanced search, which includes an advanced form optimized for legislation, a query builder for customized searches, and a command line search using SOLR query syntax. See Search Tools for details on using operators and fields in your search query. Legislation fields can be used in the search bar and the advanced search command line. Senate legislation and amendment data is also available via the Congress.gov API, where users can view and download data in a machine-readable format. To learn more about Congress.gov collections in the Congress.gov API and how to get started using the Congress.gov API visit the Congress.gov API GitHub. The modernized data exchange has empowered us to be able to move to a new phase of enhancements in Congress.gov. We look forward to sharing those with users as work is completed.”