December 2021 Release Notes

The team was hard at work at the end of 2021 preparing for the last production deployment of the calendar year. This release featured a new use case showing related Congressional Committee Prints on Congressional Bills details pages as well as enabling this linkage through the Related Documents public API service. In addition, the public API now supports Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations linkages previously implemented within the govinfo user interface. Major system upgrades, new functionality and checks for internal processes, and collection updates such as the addition of Event IDs for select Congressional Hearings were also implemented. New features and improvements for this release included 86 individually tracked changes, and this article covers some of the highlights.

New Content: Over 34,400 content packages (roughly equivalent to one bound printed document) have been made available since the beginning of October. Notable submissions since the last release include Statutes at Large Volume 128, 113th Congress 2nd Session); U.S. Government Manual, December 2021 Edition); S. Prt. 117-14 – Congressional Pictorial Directory: 117th Congress; and the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Barack Obama (2016, Book I).

Feature Articles: Six articles were featured since early October. Feature articles were published about the new Topic Browse feature for the Congressional Serial Set, highlights from govinfo presentations at the Fall 2021 Federal Depository Library Conference, Federal Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2022, and articles recognizing Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, and National History Day.

Major Upgrades to Internal Content Management System, Web Application, and Search Engine Components: Routine component upgrades, license and software updates, and security enhancements are an integral part of all govinfo releases. This release included a focused effort to complete major upgrades system-wide, including updates to the internal content management system, the front-facing web components, and also a major version update to the search engine that powers the govinfo user experience.

Related Documents for Congressional Committee Prints to Congressional Bills: From applicable Details pages in the Congressional Bills collection, you can now see links to related Congressional committee prints for that legislation. Committee prints are publications issued by Congressional committees that include topics related to their legislative or research activities as well as other matters, such as memorial tributes. Subjects of committee prints vary greatly, but some typical categories are draft reports and bills, directories, statistical materials, investigative reports, historical reports, situational studies, confidential staff reports, hearings, and legislative analyses. Visit Help to learn more about the Congressional Committee Prints collection.

Here is an example of related committee print documents linked to a bill’s Details page.

Functionality was also put into place this release to make the new committee prints to bills relationships available through the Related Documents API service.

The Related Documents feature provides users with quick and convenient access to related publications all in one place. This feature has expanded in govinfo to 14 collections and 24 relationships.

Related Documents API Service for Federal Register and CFR Documents: In an effort to build upon the new govinfo Related Documents API service launched in March 2021, this release showcases new API functionality to support linked relationships from Federal Register documents to other Federal Register documents that share the same Regulatory Identification Number (RIN) and Federal Register documents that have citations within Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) documents. This aligns with functionality that was already available through the user interface from Related Documents tabs on govinfo Details pages.

Please see the API documentation to give it a try.

Here is an example of a set of relationships for a Federal Register document:

https://api.govinfo.gov/related/01-12232?api_key=DEMO_KEY

 
{ 
"relatedId": "FR-2021-11-19/2021-23972",
"relationships": [
  {
    "relationship": "Code of Federal Regulations",
    "collection": "CFR",
    "relationshipLink": "https://api.govinfo.gov/related/2021-23972/CFR"
},
{
   "relationship": "Federal Register",
   "collection": "FR",
   "relationshipLink": "https://api.govinfo.gov/related/2021-23972/FR"
    } 
  ] 
} 

Following the relationshipLink will return information about other Federal Register documents that share the same RIN within govinfo. From there, following the granuleLink for a particular result will return additional summary metadata and allow download of the content and metadata. https://api.govinfo.gov/related/01-12232/FR?api_key=DEMO_KEY

 
{
  "rinNumber": "2120-AF79",
  "action": "Notice of proposed rulemaking; correction.",
  "granuleId": "96-20386",
  "title": "Revision of Hydraulic Systems Airworthiness Standards To Harmonize With European Airworthiness Standards for Transport Category Airplanes: Correction",
  "packageId": "FR-1996-08-12",
  "dateIssued": "1996-08-12",
  "citation": "FR 41924",
  "lastModified": "2021-12-24T02:56:54Z",
  "granuleLink": "https://api.govinfo.gov/packages/FR-1996-08-12/granules/96-20386/summary"
   },
  {
  "rinNumber": "2120-AF79",
  "granuleId": "X96-40729",
  "title": "Revision of Hydraulic Systems Airworthiness Standards to Harmonize With European Airworthiness Standards for Transport Category Airplanes",
  "packageId": "FR-1996-07-29",
  "dateIssued": "1996-07-29",
  "citation": "FR 39515",
  "lastModified": "2021-12-24T06:01:36Z",
  "granuleLink": "https://api.govinfo.gov/packages/FR-1996-07-29/granules/X96-40729/summary"
  },
  {
  "rinNumber": "2120-AF79",
  "action": "Notice of proposed rulemaking.",
  "granuleId": "96-17034",
  "title": "Revision of Hydraulic Systems Airworthiness Standards To Harmonize With European Airworthiness Standards for Transport Category Airplanes",
  "packageId": "FR-1996-07-03",
  "dateIssued": "1996-07-03",
  "citation": "FR 35056",
  "lastModified": "2021-12-24T03:21:57Z",
  "granuleLink": "https://api.govinfo.gov/packages/FR-1996-07-03/granules/96-17034/summary"
   }
 ]
} 

Record PDFs with Embedded Files in PREMIS: As part of our ongoing efforts to ensure the preservation of content within the repository, GPO expanded govinfo functionality to be able to identify PDFs with embedded files when they are submitted into the repository. When embedded files are detected, information is recorded in the PREMIS XML metadata file for a package.

Event ID Metadata for Select Congressional Hearing: In an effort to support our Legislative data partners, GPO is now including House and Senate Event IDs in MODS metadata for select hearings in the Congressional Hearings collection that have been published since January 2022.

Other Fixes and Improvements

• Provided links to House and Senate Votes in XML for Amendments in BILL STATUS XML.
• Enhanced the content management system to retain metadata changes made within the Public Papers of the President collection after documents are reprocessed.
• Resolved an issue within the CFR Parts Affected utility where parts were showing up incorrectly below titles.
• Modified the Congressional Committee Prints collection parser so that the Access Id changes when the Congress number is edited in metadata.
• Updated the Congressional Committee Prints metadata parser for extracting dates, congresses, committees, and the submitted statement.
• Enhanced the internal metadata editor for the Congressional Committee Prints and Congressional Documents collections to make the classification metadata field editable by internal authorized users and to allow multiple values.
• Made the Congressional Documents collection chamber metadata values consistent with other collections.
• Updated the configuration file that specifies how title-casing is handled in unique situations.
• Updated search field definitions for citations across all collections.
• Removed Congress member metadata elements from the Congressional Record Index collection for values that are not truly members.
• Made House Journal chamber metadata values consistent with other collections.
• Enabled the capability to prevent the extraction of deleted short titles into metadata for the Congressional Bills collection.
• Fixed an issue with multibook “View Entire Issue” buttons for the Congressional Record collection.
• Enhanced the internal metadata editor for the Congressional Reports collection to make Congress member and political party repeating values.
• Updated navigation and functionality in the internal metadata editor.
• Implemented new display logic for preferred citations in the Congressional Hearings collection.
• Updated the internal metadata editor to make identifier fields editable by authorized internal users for the Public and Private Laws collection. Metadata edits that are made to these fields are also maintained after the document is reprocessed.
• Updated the arity of the preceding title and succeeding title metadata elements in the Bulk Government Publications collection.
• Updated the internal metadata editor to give authorized users the ability to add a “yearsinOffice” attribute to the President standard reference metadata elements for various collections.
• Updated the Congressional Serial Set collection to address multiple user feedback items gathered after the initial launch of the collection.
• Updated the metadata parser that sets the legislative day metadata element for all subsequent granules within a Congressional Record section.
• Improved the metadata parser for the detection of cosponsors and last action in History of Bills granules.
• Implemented automated processing and testing for internal submission mechanisms.
• Upgraded numerous internal components’ schemas and parsers.
• Implemented important and routine component upgrades, license and software updates, and security enhancements.