The Senate posted (.pdf) Nov. 14 the first of what will become a semiannual report on its spending, as required by the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act 2010 (P.L. No. 111-68). The 2314 page, 12 MB, .pdf document pulls together publicly-available disbursement statements for the first time in an online posting. The report covers the period between April 1, 2011 to Sept. 30, 2011.

Open government advocates gave the report mixed reviews. While the document is searchable, it is not a database. "For the public--or members of the Senate--to be able to evaluate the contents of the report, they're going to have to scrape all of the data from the PDF and put it into a database," wrote Daniel Schuman, policy counsel at the Sunlight Foundation in a Nov. 30 blog post.

The Senate says the document is presented in this format so the files could be digitally signed by the Government Printing Office "to secure the data integrity and provides users with assurance that the content is unchanged since it was disseminated by GPO." See the Senate report (.pdf).