Happy Birthday Govinfo!

The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) launched govinfo on February 3, 2016, as a beta to eventually replace the Federal Digital System (FDsys) public website.

During our first year, we had five code deployments that consisted of a wide range of features, enhancements, fixes and design updates. We built the Browse by Government Author feature, added Related Resources to the browse pages, built initial functionality for analytics, and built a number of pages not available when we first launched.

Here are some specific highlights from the past year, an update on the transition from FDsys, and some enhancements coming soon.

Search Enhancements

We overhauled the search filters to implement requests from users like you:

• Select multiple values within each filter to refine your search results - for example, you can narrow search results by multiple collections
  

  Other default filters besides Collection include Date Published, Government Author, Organization, and Person.

• Sort the list of values within filters - for example, view the date filters in chronological order instead of the default order (number of results)
  

  Click "date" to sort dates in order of most recent or "count" to sort in order of highest number of results to least.

• Filter values can be removed at the top of the search results list
• We added hyperlinks to search result titles and implemented pagination instead of an infinite scroll based on user feedback
• After you start refining your search using filters, your selections appear at the top of the filter column so you can easily see what you've selected so far

Related Documents Enhancements

Links to related documents are available on the Details pages for select publications in five collections:

• House and Senate Bills link to other bill versions of the legislation; Congressional Reports for the legislation; Presidential Signing Statements and Remarks for legislation from the Compilation of Presidential Documents; Public Law for the legislation; Statutes at Large document for the legislation; U.S. Code documents that reference the legislation
• Federal Register (documents that have a regulatory id number) link to other Federal Register rulemaking documents that share a Regulatory ID Number, CFR documents referenced by that Federal Register document
• Public and Private laws link to related Bill versions of the legislation; Congressional Reports for the legislation; Presidential Signing Statements and Remarks for the legislation from the Compilation of Presidential Documents; Public Laws for the legislation; Statutes at Large document for the legislation; U.S. Code documents that reference the legislation
• Compilation of Presidential Documents (Presidential signing statements and remarks)- link to related Bill versions and Public Law
• Congressional Reports- link to related Bill versions and Public Law

Link to Bill versions and Public and Private Law related to H. Rept. 106-513 on the Details page.

You can find related documents on govinfo in just 3 steps:

• Find a publication- through searching or browsing
• Click Details
• Click the Related documents tab

See important notes about how this feature works and how the relationships are determined, and learn more about finding related documents on govinfo or download the quick reference guide (PDF).

Shorter, Cleaner URLs

URLs throughout the site have been optimized to be shorter, shareable, and consistent.

For example, Browse page URLs used to look like this: Now they look like this:

New Content

Here's a glance at new content that was made available for the first time on govinfo during the past year:

• January 19, 2017- President Obama Public Papers 2012 Book I
• January 12, 2017- New Edition of the GPO Style Manual
• January 11, 2017- Digitized Federal Register Volumes 1990-1994
• September 20, 2016- Digitized Bound Congressional Record Volumes 1991-1998 and November 29, 2016- Volumes 1981-1990
• August 25, 2016- 2016 Edition of Keeping America Informed
• March 23, 2016- House Manual in Bulk XML and February 24, 2016- Congressional Bill Status in Bulk XML (made available through GPO's Bulk Data Repository)

Features Articles

We featured more than 70 articles on the homepage including new content announcements, curated collections of content, and development updates in our Release Notes. In case you missed them, here are some that were the most popular:

• 2016 Plum Book
• Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2017
• Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990
• Digitized Bound Congressional Record 1991-1998
• Release Notes

Resources Available

Video tutorials, handouts, FAQs, search examples and more are available in the Help section of the site.

Feedback

We've received great feedback, including from Paul Ryan, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, recognizing GPO's launch of govinfo in support of efforts to "create true transparency." Send your feedback to let us know what you think about the beta site.

Speaker Paul Ryan congratulates GPO by letter on the launch of govinfo.

Transition from FDsys to govinfo

The majority of FDsys pages now have equivalent pages on govinfo. The few exceptions include the CFR Parts Affected tool and GPO's Bulk Data Repository (planned for 2017). View the A-Z browse list to become familiar with the types of publications you can find on govinfo.

The transition from FDsys to govinfo will occur in stages:

1. govinfo is in beta and FDsys remains available. (This is where we are now)
2. govinfo is out of the beta phase (Planned for 2018)
3. FDsys is retired and replaced by govinfo.

Coming Soon

What we're working on next.

• Building sitemaps for govinfo.
• Migrating GPO's Bulk Data Repository to govinfo.
• Updating metadata files to reference govinfo instead of FDsys.
• Integrating additional Help information.
• Linking additional related documents within the system.
• Implementing additional enhancements and fixes.