April 2016 Release Notes

Published: April 11, 2016

Release Notes
New Features and Enhancements are Now Available

As part of our recent release, the govinfo team has implemented nearly 50 code changes that include design and display updates, backend performance improvements, search engine tweaks, additional functionality, and a range of other enhancements. Below are some highlights.


New Features and Enhancements

  • Built the Bound Congressional Record Browse page and Detail pages.
  • Enabled Document in Context feature in Details pages for Congressional Record, Statutes at Large, and U.S. Courts Opinions collections
  • Added quick link to Compilation of Presidential Documents published in the last 45 days to Recent Publications on the homepage
  • Added mapped search queries for Cromnibus and Taximan
  • Added all collection titles to the A to Z Browse list (collections without govinfo browse pages will link back to FDsys)

New Content

  • Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2017, made available on February 9, 2016
  • Economic Report of the President 2016, made available on February 22, 2016
  • Congressional Directory of the 114th Congress, made available on March 16, 2016
  • United States Government Manual 2015, made available April 6, 2016

    • Minor Fixes

    • Corrected order of Code of Federal Regulations volumes in download boxes on browse page
    • Fixed Twitter share links on several browse pages and email share link across the site
    • Fixed page number links within the Federal Register Table of Contents XML
    • Added Public or Private Law Citation as a field in the Congressional Hearings Advanced Search
    • Changed Serial Number citations in Congressional Hearings and Reports MODS to a standard citation format
    • Fixed a bug causing searches with the publish date field to return an error
    • Corrected how search engine handles colons and wildcards within quotes in search queries
    • Fixed the case number field functionality for U.S. Courts Opinions Advanced Search

    Features

    In addition to the code changes in this release, we posted 12 features highlighting new and curated content. These included new content and curated collections of documents relating to Gerald Ford, Nancy Reagan, the Peace Corps 55th anniversary, and GPO's 155th anniversary. View all of our features.


    Developer Community

    For our developer community, we made available the 114th House Rules and Manual in XML format for the first time using the United States Legislative Markup (USLM) schema. The XML is available on govinfo as well as GPO's GitHub account and for bulk download on GPO's bulk data repository. We also made available Congressional bill statuses in XML format through the bulk data repository for the 113th and 114th Congresses and subsequently updated the XML to incorporate actions made on amendments.


    Feedback

    We've received more than 60 responses to our feedback survey and responded to a number of inquiries about the new govinfo beta site. Remember to give your feedback on our survey or contact us via askGPO.


    Coming Soon

    The govinfo team will be presenting a remote demo and Q&A as part of the Depository Library Council Virtual Meeting on April 27 at 3:15 pm. The webinar is open to the public, and additional information and free registration is available on FDLP.gov. This webinar will also be recorded and available after the event on the FDLP Academy website.


    The following are a few of our next priorities for development:

    • Additional browse pages and content detail pages
    • Additional publication linking use cases
    • Browse by Government Author
    • Additional integrated Help information
    • Improved user analytics
    • Consistency of back button and bookmarkable links functionality
    • Continued improvements to display for mobile devices

    Meet govinfo: Learn more about this beta website and see what's available.