December 2022 Release Notes

The final production deployment of the year included 93 individually tracked changes and concluded another busy cycle for the GovInfo team. The release featured new functionality to alert users when they are viewing the most recently available version of content in the Code of Federal Regulations and the U.S. Code collections. Additionally, GPO made several updates to provide access to new content including publications produced by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), digitized historical volumes of the Congressional Directory back to 1869 (41st Congress) and more. GPO also made enhancements to the content management system along with a new Related Documents API relationship to link Bills to their corresponding Bill Status XML Bulk Data files and improved navigation and styling of Related Resources on collection browse pages.

New Content: Over 41,000 content packages (roughly equivalent to one bound printed document) were made available from the period of October 1 to December 31. Notable submissions since the last release included the U.S. Statutes at Large, Volume 130 (114th Congress, 2nd Session); S. Doc 117-14 - Secretary Report of the Senate: April 1, 2022 to September 30, 2022 for Part I and Part II; H. Doc. 115-62 - Precedents of the U.S. House of Representatives (2017 series), Volume 3, Chapters 7 – 9; the 2022 Federal Register Index; the 2022 CFR Index; partnership content such as the Forest Service’s Stibnite Mining Project Gold Mine and Mill: Final Environmental Impact Statement from Agriculture Department and House Democracy partnership publications; court opinions for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court Northern District of New York (NYNB); interim packages for the Privacy Act Issuances collection; 11,000 digitized Serial Set reports and documents, digitized Congressional Hearings; additional Railroad Retirement Board publications; additional GPO partnership publications; and more.

Feature Articles: Nine feature articles were published from the period of October 1 to December 31. These included articles commemorating the Anniversary of the Opening of the Erie Canal, World Digital Preservation Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, Human Rights Day, as well as features celebrating Maple Syrup Day, presentation materials from the Fall Federal Depository Library Conference, and updates to Federal Appropriations for FY 2023.

Version Indicators on Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and U.S. Code Details Pages: In an effort to make it easier for users to know if they are viewing the most recently published version of a document versus an older or out-of-date version, GPO applied visual indicators to CFR and U.S. Code Content Details pages. At the top of a CFR or U.S. Code Content Details page, users will now see a small yellow star with a note indicating that this is the most recent version of the document available in GovInfo.

Users will also see a small yellow exclamation point in a triangle with a note and a link to a more recent version.

Design Updates for Related Resources on Collection Browse Pages: Much of the content available in GovInfo belongs to a designated collection. “Collection” refers to a group of documents that are processed and made available through the internal content management system and on the public user interface in the same way. Collections in GovInfo have landing pages where documents are listed in a hierarchical browse structure. At the bottom of the browse pages are unique groupings of related resources which contain a list of links and descriptions for resources that may be of interest to the users of that particular collection of documents. Below is an example of the new look and feel for related documents on the Federal Register browse page. Browse collections in GovInfo from the A-Z browse page, the Category browse page, or dig deeper into collection search tips, information about the collection, and metadata examples for the collection in Help.

Digitized Congressional Directory: GPO continues to digitize and provide access to historical publications. In this release, the team developed functionality to process, publish, and display digitized Congressional Directory volumes back to the 41st Congress (1869-1871). The Congressional Directory contains short biographies of each member of the Senate and the House of Representatives listed by state or district. Entries typically include committee membership, terms of service, administrative staff, and information such as room and telephone numbers. In addition, the Congressional Directory lists officials of the courts, military establishments, and other Federal departments and agencies, including D.C. government officials, governors of states and territories, foreign diplomats, and members of the press, radio and television galleries. Historical volumes will be published in GovInfo over the coming months and will be available to browse and download at the full book or publication level, while the more recent issues from the 105th Congress forward are available at both the full book and the section level.

Above and to the right is the cover of a digitized Congressional Directory from the 1869 (2nd Session of the 41st Congress).

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Publications: The mission of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is to manage development of U.S. Outer Continental Shelf energy and mineral resources in an environmentally and economically responsible way, and GPO now provides access to BOEM publications via GovInfo. In this release, GPO made customizations to enable the initial set of BOEM Environmental Studies Program, Technical Summaries and Final Reports to be submitted and made available on GovInfo. Check out documents organized by geographic scope from the new BOEM landing page.

Above and to the right is an image from the publication, Western Gulf of Alaska Tides and Circulation, 1985.

Additional Enhancements:

• Completed ISO 16363 surveillance audit to maintain ISO 16363 certification.
• Improved parsing of select Committee Hearings to indicate they are joint hearing in metadata.
• Added Bill Status as a relationship from the Congressional Bills collection within the API.
• Provided access to the Select January 6th Committee Final Report and Supporting Materials Collection.
• Migrated from Congress.gov API v2 to Congress.gov API v3.
• Updated Bill Status XML Bulk Data files to use the Congress.gov API v3 data structure and implemented a version element. For more information, see the related bill-status GitHub issue.
• Migrated GovInfo’s Congress Member authority file update process, which uses the Congress.gov API, from legacy identifiers to BioGuideIDs.
• Updated e-CFR XML transformations for certain dash characters.
• Updated Federal Register metadata fields to allow a new Presidential document type designation.
• Refactored select parser code for improved maintainability.
• Upgraded software used by public-facing components.
• Resolved an issue with extra characters displaying in the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection.
• Improved the parsing of short titles that occur at the end of Bills.
• Resolved an issue with Citation Search in which the Most Recent drop-down selection was not being selected properly.
• Updated the parser for the Congressional Hearings collection.
• Configured internal content management system reports.
• Added new attribute values for the PM/otherIdentifier/@idStandard field and the attribute of the PCS/field/@display to the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection.
• Updated descriptive metadata transforms to include the PM/subtitle field use case.
• Updated the internal metadata editor for the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection for PCS/field/@display.
• Improved the logic that is used to split Senate Congressional Record documents into smaller documents. Made numerous updates to the internal XML Metadata Editor for various package-level metadata fields.
• Resolved a reprocessing error that occurred for digitized Congressional Committee Prints, Hearings, the Federal Register, and Public Papers of the President.
• Resolved an issue related to the Statute Compilations XML Bulk Data RSS feed.
• Added “joint” as an allowable value for chamber in the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection.
• Made GovInfo interface styling improvements to footers, modals, and text displays.
• Upda ted sitemaps to include all daily issues when multiple issues of the Congressional Record are published in one day.
• Resolved a styling issue for the Congressional Committee Prints collection where tab information on Content Details was displaying in all italics.
• Updated Congressional Committee Prints nodes on Committee Browse pages to show all documents for multi-part prints.
• Updated generation of Congressional Committee Prints preferred citation metadata for packages without a PCS/number field.
• Updates to the GovInfo API to support mp4 format by providing “videoLink” on package and granule summaries.
• Updated Bill Status XML Bulk Data files to include a textVersion element.
• Added Actions into Amendments that are within Bill Status XML Bulk Data files.
• Improved the display of superscript characters in metadata title that are displayed in Search Results and on Content Details pages for the Bills and Public Laws collections.
• Performed software and security upgrades.