Resources - Site review - PA's political argy-bargy. Mark Chillingworth fires up a Press Association tool for searching televised parliamentary debates that puts the politicians firmly in the spotlight.

Two issues have been grabbing a lot of headline space of late: video search and leadership changes within the UK's political parties. So a web service that provides free text searching of BBC and Press Association content from the Houses of Parliament is particularly well timed.

Over recent months, Information World Review has been testing the Politics Today service to monitor both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leadership elections, as well as all the debates in between.

Developed by PA Business, a division of the noted newswire agency, the Politics Today site provides live and archived content, which is offered rights-free, courtesy of the Parliamentary Broadcast Unit, which fully backs the service.

Politics Today uses a search engine specifically developed for TV material from TVEyes. Users gain full search access to PA newswire reports from parliament, as well as the ability to search video content.

Although the TV search was IWR's primary reason for taking a closer look at this service, newswire access adds to the high level of information it provides. The newswire copy is clearly laid out, giving users a set of tools for printing and downloading the content to complement their video-based research.

Content is broken into useful channels on Politics Today, which will help users navigate their way through the information lobbies of parliament. Channels include the House of Lords, select committees, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, and, of course, the House of Commons.

To accompany the BBC footage, Politics Today allows users to download the subtitles of the debate they are viewing in text format. The subtitles come in the form of plain text files, making them an ideal, open-standard resource to save to a computer or media format without worrying about the problems caused by using a non-Windows system.