June 2024 Release Notes

The early summer release for GovInfo is comprised of 85 individually tracked system changes. This includes an upgrade for the GovInfo search engine to the latest major version, the creation of a new customizable search widget, and improved advanced searching capabilities for the Code of Federal Regulations collection. Enhancements were also made to the Budget of the U.S. Government and Economic Report of the President collections by incorporating historical documents from the digitized U.S. Congressional Serial Set. As with other releases, there were security patches and component upgrades, design improvements, collection and system enhancements, bug fixes, and more.

New Content: Nearly 59,000 content packages (roughly equivalent to one bound printed document) were made available from the period of April 1 to June 30. Significant submissions included Volumes 1-64 (1789-1950) of the digitized United States Statutes at Large and 115 reports submitted by Federal agencies into the new Congressionally Mandated Reports collection, which brings the total to over 430 reports . Other important submissions were S. Doc. 118-11 - Report of the Secretary of the Senate: October 1, 2023 through March 31, 2024, Part I and Part II; the CFR Index and Finding Aids for 2024; the 2021 edition of the Journal of the House of Representatives; Volume 38, No. 1-7 of the FCC Record: A comprehensive compilation of decisions, reports, public notices and other documents of the Federal Communications Commission of the United States; Vol. 25, No. 1, (2024) of the National Security Agency’s The Next Wave publication; the Transmittal Letter for the Semiannual Report of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) covering the 6-month period of October 1, 2023 through March 31, 2024; 13,138 digitized U.S. Congressional Serial Set reports, documents, and journals; 259 digitized Congressional Hearings; interim packages for the Privacy Act Issuances collection; Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) publications; partnership publications from the Indiana State Library including five volumes of the Decisions of the Department of the Interior and the General Land Office in Cases Relating to the Public Lands; partnership publications from the University of Memphis produced by the Peace Corps; and more.

Feature Articles: Twelve feature articles were published from the period of April 1 to June 30. These included articles commemorating Autism Awareness and Acceptance Month, Earth Day, Mental Health Awareness Month, Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, LGBTQIA+ Pride Month, Flag Day, and Juneteenth, and articles highlighting the March GovInfo Release Notes, NSA's The Next Wave, the National Junior Ranger Programs, and the release of the Federal Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2024.

Search Engine Upgrade: The team performed a major upgrade to GovInfo's open-source search engine, a key component of the system that drives GovInfo's sophisticated, metadata-powered search experience. This upgrade enables GovInfo to support additional future enhancements to the search engine that will aid in customizing the search experience for users.

Customizable Search Widget: GPO strives to incorporate improvements into GovInfo that get to the heart of helping users find Government information. To that end, the team worked on a customizable search widget that can be displayed on certain content browse pages and will be available for use by third parties as an embedded widget on non-GovInfo websites. This widget helps users quickly target a specialized search directly on a specific set of content by providing the ability to easily select search criteria for complex searches similar to the advanced search functionality. As part of this release, GovInfo initially launched this widget for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) publications.

The widget can be opened and closed based on user preference.

Advanced Search - Code of Federal Regulations Titles: Also as part of this release, the team added the full name of the title to the listing of title numbers in the advanced search form field for "CFR Title Number" for the Code of Federal Regulations collection. This will help users more quickly verify that they are searching against the correct title.

Browse Historical Budget and Economic Report of the President Documents from within the U.S. Congressional Serial Set: During this release, the team integrated the digitized Budget of the United States Government and the digitized Economic Report of the President documents produced within the historical U.S. Congressional Serial Set collection into the appropriate related regular collection browses. This supports ongoing efforts to increase discoverability of historical content across historical and modern versions of the same content and provides easier access to the related materials for users.

Additional Enhancements:

• Created a new RSS Feed for the FCC Record publications.
• Made the Congressional Bill Summaries (BILLSUM) Bulk Data collection available via the GovInfo API.
• Added witness metadata to granule summaries in the GovInfo API for the Congressional Hearings collection.
• Changed BILLSTATUS "xmlLinks" to use the standard API URL pattern instead of bulkdata links in the GovInfo API.
• Improved error messages and status codes for the GovInfo API Related Service when an individual "relationshipLink" does not have results.
• Updated "courtCode" validation to include additional courtCodes for the U.S. Courts collection in the GovInfo API.
• For Congressional publications, added parsed name information to granule summaries in the GovInfo API.
• Improved the GovInfo API Search Service sorting options to ensure improved consistency.
• Added a new “years” attribute to the congress descriptive metadata (MODS) field in the Congressional Reports collection.
• Added new internal scanning functionality for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and tools to review workflows for the Additional Government Publications collection.
• Implemented new logic for calculating browse years for the House Rules and Manual and the Senate Manual collections.
• Added new internal scanning functionality for PII and tools to review workflows for the Additional Government Publications collection.
• Refactored parsers for the Congressional Bills, Congressional Reports, and Congressional Committee Prints collections to improve performance and maintainability.
• Changed how the Congressional Documents collection calculates browse year ranges.
• Migrated the Congressional Bills collection browse to the new web application framework.
• Added “cgacCode” and “Treasury” code fields to the downloadable Table of Reports resource for the Congressionally Mandated Reports collection.
• Implemented sorting functionality on the Congressionally Mandated Reports Table of Reports resource so that the most recently added reports appear at the end of the list.
• Improved the assignment of publisher values for the United States Statutes at Large collection so that the value of “Government Printing Office” or “Government Publishing Office” is populated based on issue date.
• Improved the Document in Context display for House and Senate Concurrent Resolutions in the United States Statutes at Large collection.
• Improved the Congressional Record collection granule titles by removing hard returns.
• Ensured that the Related Documents feature pulls congressional sponsor information based on BioGuideId.
• Improved browse sorting for the Congressional Directory collection.
• Improved parsing of additional short title patterns for the Congressional Bills collection.
• Enabled additional patterns to parse digitized United States Statutes at Large parts.
• Updated the Miscellaneous Government Publication collection to include parsing of the MARC XML field 099 if a 086 SuDoc, or "Author" field is not available.
• Updated the browse description for the Public Papers of the Presidents collection.
• Implemented additional date field validations for the Browse by Date functionality.
• Fixed an issue where House Joint Resolution citations were appearing as E.J. Res. instead of H.J. Res on Congressional Record Index content details pages.
• Added additional verification to the Congressional Committee Prints collection to check submitted PDF files for passwords.
• Continued improving the GovInfo automated tests and supporting infrastructure.
• Upgraded the web content management system that is used to author Feature Articles and update help pages.
• Performed other miscellaneous security and library upgrades to ensure that the system performs optimally and to reduce risk to preservation and public access.