The Pennsylvania Senate and House of Representatives maintain official profiles of all members with various biographical data and contact information. Archived versions of former legislators may be obtained through the Internet Archive project. Either method might require some trial and error and a familiarity with the Internet Archive.
Method 1: - Select legislator's profile from these archived directories.
Each party's caucus in the House and Senate maintain official webpages for its members. Generally, each caucus' web development team follows a certain predictable pattern of assigning URLs for these webpages. Generally, the desired archived page can be found by replacing XXX with the legislator's last name. If that is unsuccessful, a certain amount of trial and error might be required. Try a variety of capitalization schemes or using the senator's full name in place of the XXX. If multiple legislators have the same last name, try various forms of the first initial. Alternatively, try using the Senator's name as the domain with .com, .net, or .org. The correct internet address might be referenced in an archived profile. Some of these strategies will yield official campaign websites, which are also valuable sources of material. Unfortunately, some Internet Archive queries are blocked by a Robots exclusion standard.
A verbatim transcript of things said and done on the House and Senate floors, dating back to the beginning of the 1975. Materials are organized by session day, with no general search capability. Text searches on individual documents is possible.
The Pennsylvania Department of State maintains campaign finance data for state-level politicians, including Pennsylvania Governor and Lt. Governor, State-wide row offices, State Senators, State Representatives, and elected judges. The databases, which are searchable by candidate, contributor, and expenditure, are available at http://www.campaignfinance.state.pa.us/CFHome.aspx
"Follow the Money" is a project of the National Institute on Money in State Politics, maintaining large databases of state-level campaign finance reports. The database is available at http://www.followthemoney.org/.
The Pennsylvania Manual is a comprehensive guide to Pennsylvania's government. Produced bi-annually, this 1000+ page document records data regarding its political history, election results, and the Pennsylvania Constitution. It also contains a list of former legislators, a record of past legislative leaders, and biographies of legislators. Below you will find links to the last three volumes of the Pennsylvania Manual in PDF form. Before opening, please note that these documents are image-intensive and extremely large.
Project Vote Smart is a nonprofit organization that collects biographical and ideological data on candidates for office. It maintains some voting patterns on incumbents as well. To use the service, search http://www.votesmart.org/ for the legislator's profiles. Project Vote Smart pages data can be used for Inline citations or as External links. To use the {{CongLinks}} template, locate the individual's ID number, which can be found at the end of the URL string. For example, the profile for Bill DeWeese is at http://www.votesmart.org/bio.php?can_id=9119, making his id number "9119."
The pages are de-activated once a legislator is out of office, so consider using web archival services like WebCite (currently out of service) to preserve the data. Also consider using the "| quote=" parameters for inline citations.
The Insider is a bi-weekly political newsletter focusing on events in Pennsylvania's politics. It is a good source for analysis on political events or figures, especially for events "behind-closed-doors," like budget or legislative negotiations. Back issues are hard to find, so try a google search with site:www.insiderpa.com plus keywords to find some good articles. Also, try the Internet Archive.
Professor Harold Cox of Wilkes University has compiled election data for almost all of Pennsylvania's Presidential, Senatorial, and Gubernatorial elections, dating back to 1796. Also has a table of members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly dating to 1682. The project has not been updated since 2006, and may contain some minor errors.
This is a list of various newspapers in Pennsylvania that might be useful in finding relevant information. Please note that some newspapers (like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) maintain extensive searchible archives of old articles, while some newspapers (like the Philadelphia Inquirer) deactivate online articles quickly and charge for continued access. Please consult the {{Cite web}} template for information on how to use "archivedurl=" and "quote=" parameters to preserve volatile information. Most newspaper articles are not retrievable with the Internet Archive. Alternate sources of information include Google News Search at http://news.google.com/, which allows for date-restricted searches of some old newspapers articles. Many of these are scanned images of the original newspaper.
Some political news aggregators may serve as convenient starting points, as they may provide links to and summaries of appropriate news articles. Some, like PoliticsPA may contain feature stories and original content that might be appropriate for inclusion. Please consult Wikipedia:Reliable Sources before doing so. For example, Best and Worst Campaigns in 2002 or Top Political Activists might be appropriate for use. Use the Internet Archive to find older material on these sites. Per Wikipedia:Verifiability (at note 4), "blogs" maintained by journalists through a newspaper website may be considered "interactive columns" and may be acceptable for use in Wikipedia. Even though some material is offered to subscribers only, it is still permitted for use as a source. Be sure to use a full citation format and consider using the "quote=" parameter for facts that might be challenged.
