unitedstates/congress-legislators — pull request #124 by bchartoff (2013-07-31 20:28:28+00:00)
Title: hand filled icpsr holes, 87th-113th congresses

Filled in holes in data by hand, through the 87th congress (113-87,
most recent additions were in the 102nd congress, but no holes exist in
congresses 87-101). Holes existed for a number of flaws in the roll
call source data including:
- mispellings of legislator last names
- inconsistnecies in representation of multipart last names (e.g.
MOSELEY-BRA for Mosely Braun, WAL./GREENE for Green Waldholtz)
- no data for recent winners of special elections:
-NOTE: Mark Sanford and Jason Smith, will need to have their
id's updated at the time of data entry for the 114th congress.
- The most common cause was duplicate congress#/last name/state/chamber
pairs, which had to be distinguished based on roll call voting records,
which were found here: http://clerk.house.gov/legislative/legvotes.aspx
- Some but not all entries in the source data include last and first
name data. Difficult to discern a pattern, many but not all last names
that were < 6 char long included first names or partial first names,
(last name + two spaces + partial first name), often making the full
name larger than 8 characters, which is the cut off for representation
of last names, elsewhere in the data.

Note, while I have not tested it, I ran across this R package
http://rss.acs.unt.edu/Rdoc/library/pscl/html/readKH.html
the documentation of which helped in parsing roll call data.