September 2019 Release Notes

In addition to component upgrades, security enhancements, and improvements to the content management system, the following items were deployed in this release. Please note that certain fixes and enhancements may require content to be re-processed or re-published for the updates to take effect and this will be completed over a period of time. Content made available after these fixes and enhancements have been implemented will reflect the updates. In addition, an interim release is scheduled for next month for numerous front end items, and this article will be updated after the release is deployed.

• Updated handling for Congressional Record and Congressional Calendars that occur on the same date, but occur in different Congresses or sessions. In the future, these occurrences will result in two separate packages.
• Enabled ability to accept non-standard characters in access IDs for Congressional Hearings.
• Enhanced the content management system to retain metadata changes made for Congressional Documents when they are reprocessed.
• Updated consistency check query for the U.S. Courts Opinions collection and conducted a semi-annual data integrity validation which scanned the data in the repository and verified no issues. Consistency and integrity checks are monitoring and reporting mechanisms in place to validate content integrity and provenance (i.e. the chain of custody and all events within that chain).
• Enabled notifications to identify potential quality issues earlier as part of our overall focus on data quality throughout the system.
• Updated how front matter files are presented on House Rules and Manual collection pages.
• Updated how issue-level titles are handled when editing metadata for the Congressional Record collection.
• Added items to a whitelist to ensure correct casing for acronyms that are displayed on the site (e.g. TSA, FLSA, USF).
• Adjusted internal process for how updates to Bill Status files are handled within the system.
• Added Members' social media links to Congressional Directory MODS XML metadata. We are now parsing the Congressional Directory text files to extract links to social media accounts and adding this information to the associated MODS XML files. For example, try this search to find all members that list a Twitter account in the Congressional Directory for the 115th Congress. When the Congressional Directory for the 116th Congress is published, this information will available in the associated MODS XML metadata file. We also plan to update the govinfo API in an upcoming release to make social media links available there as well.

Over 1,500 Digitized Congressional Hearings Added – GPO has been digitizing historical Congressional Hearings and making them available on govinfo. Since October 2018, more than 1,500 have been added as part of this ongoing effort to provide increased access. Learn more.

GPO Produces U.S. Code with New Digital Publishing Technology – GPO has taken a major step forward in the modernization of its publishing systems by beginning to publish the 2018 main edition of the United States Code through XPub, the agency’s new digital technology for XML-based publishing.

Featured Content – See documents related to the Anniversary of the Wilderness Act and Land and Water Conservation Bill, Constitution Day and Citizenship Day 2019, September 11 Observance, and more.