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On April 23 Vrezh Gasparyan, Chief of Staff of the National Assembly, met with U.S. Ambassador to Armenia John Heffern and David Mao, Law Librarian of Congress .

In the course of the meeting the possible of cooperation and exchange of experience between the National Assembly and the Congress were discussed.

Welcoming the guests’ visit to the parliament, which has the goal to introduce the functions of the Library of Congress to the Staff, Vrezh Gasparyan has expressed hope that it will be useful for the NA employees to deepen knowledge, to be informed using the American experience in assisting the parliamentarians’ work.

From the view of the independence of the parliament the U.S. Ambassador  deemed important that the legislative body would have its source of information. Only in this research structure of the Library of U.S. Congress with that purpose, as David Mao presented, 625 people work, the majority of them are professional analysts and specialists of information. Noting the procedures of preparing analyses, reports and articles for making them accessible to the Congressmen, by which the specialists are led: accurateness, necessity of using the source and exclusion of political influence. Besides the information, which is also accessible by online version, the Staff of Research Division gives advice to the Congressmen.

Vrezh Gasparyan expressed readiness on the same day to generalize the notions and proposals of possible directions of cooperation after the seminar on the theme “An Informed Legislature: How the Library of Congress Serves the Research Needs of Congress.”