Definition
The Legislative Indexing Vocabulary (LIV) was the Congressional Research Service (CRS) thesaurus for subject searching in databases of the Library of Congress from 1973 to 2008. This controlled vocabulary provided access via specific subjects to legislative material, public policy literature, and CRS products. With increased availability of electronic full text of documents and accompanying search capabilities, the level of detail employed by LIV became unnecessary and work began to modernize and streamline the pool of vocabulary terms assigned by CRS analysts to classify and group legislation. Those efforts resulted in the far more compact list of legislative subject terms, in use since 2009.