IT, publishing, Media

Tizra Makes Stimulus Bill Searchable

Wade Roush 4/1/09

Until now, the only way to read the 400-plus-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (otherwise known as the Stimulus Bill) has been to download a 13-megabyte PDF version or scroll through messy, unpaginated HTML versions. But now Tizra, the Providence, RI online publishing company we profiled in February, has used its platform to create a searchable online version of the bill that breaks the giant document into easily navigable sections.

The Tizra version preserves the bill’s original formatting and page numbers, allowing users to reference or bookmark specific sections. The idea is to make the whole bill more Web-friendly—for example, by making it easier to cite specific spending provisions in the bill via social bookmarking sites such as Digg or Delicious. Tizra has also added a commenting function that lets users share their thoughts about specific pages of the bill.

“There is no single piece of information or legislation that has gained so much attention in recent times, yet there was clearly a lack of easy and useful access to this historic bill,” Tizra’s chief operating officer, Abe Dane, said in a statement. “With the media focusing so much attention on who actually read the bill, we thought it would be helpful to see how easy it was for the public, media and lawmakers to access and research it.”

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com, call him at (617) 252-7323, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/wroush.