September 2022 Release Notes

The GovInfo team was hard at work over the summer months developing a variety of improvements and updates to the system. This included 78 individually tracked changes for the latest public release with highlighted features such as updates to the Congressional Record for increased access to Senate introductory statements, display of related Congressional Record documents on Bills’ details pages, display of related Public Laws on Congressional Record details’ pages, the capability to retrieve up to 1,000 results through the API, new tools to support systematic ingest of previously cataloged born-digital Government publications, and a major upgrade to the internal content management system (CMS).

New Content: Over 40,000 content packages (roughly equivalent to one bound printed document) were made available from the period of July 1 to September 30. Notable submissions since the last release included U.S. Statutes at Large, Volume 129 (114th Congress, 1st Session); Budget of the United States Government, FY 2023 – Mid-Session Review; Spring 2022 Semiannual Regulatory Agenda: Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions; S. Pub. 116-8 – Journal of the Senate of the United States of America (116th Congress, 2nd Session); Journals of the House of Representatives for 2018 (115th Congress, 2nd Session) and 2019 (116th Congress, 1st Session); court opinions for the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) and the U.S. District Court for the District of South Dakota (SDD); interim packages for the Privacy Act Issuances collection; additional digitized Serial Set volumes; digitized Congressional hearings; digitized Committee prints; additional Railroad Retirement Board publications; and GPO partnership publications.

Feature Articles: Ten feature articles were published from the period of July 1 to September 30. These included articles commemorating Independence Day, the Anniversary of the First Patent Issued in the United States, the Anniversary of the Social Security Act of 1935, Labor Day, September 11, Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, National History Day 2022-2023, and an article celebrating GovInfo winning a 2022 Government Experience Award.

Improved Access for Senate Introductory Statements in the Congressional Record: Building on previous efforts to bring more transparency to content available on GovInfo, particularly for the Congressional Record, it is now possible to access sub-granules for statements on introduced bills and joint resolutions through searching and browsing. These introductory statements are comprised of commentary by Congress members that are stated in the Record just before legislation is introduced.

API functionality was built to filter the related Congressional Record results for a given bill by the type of entry. The example API link for 168 Cong. Rec. S4823 - Introductory Statement for S. 4879 is https://api.govinfo.gov/related/BILLS-117s4879is/CREC?subGranuleClass=SSTATEMENTSIND&api_key=DEMO_KEY

The images below illustrate a page from 168 Cong. Rec. S4823 - Introductory Statement on S. 4879 highlighted, as well as an image of the new sub-granules listed in browse and on the Document in Context page below the original top-level granule.

Related Documents for Congressional Bills to the Congressional Record: From Congressional Bills details pages it is now possible to see links from that legislation to related pages in the Congressional Record and access these documents from the API. The Congressional Record is the official record of the daily proceedings and debates on the floor of the United States Congress. Examples of the types of related Congressional Record documents to bills include where legislation was introduced, reported, voted, agreed to by both chambers, had sponsors added, and much more. The benefit of this relationship is that users do not have to conduct multiple searches using filters or targeted criteria to pin down documents from the Congressional Record that matter for this legislation; displaying related documents in this way makes the navigation logical and convenient for users.

Related Documents for the Congressional Record to Public and Private Laws: To continue the focus on creating relationships using GovInfo’s semantic technology and extensive metadata, we also created linkages to laws from relevant Congressional Record pages. These are now displayed on the user interface and are also available through the API. Previously, related bill versions were available from the Congressional Record pages, but not the slip laws. Slip laws are official publications of the law and serve as "competent evidence," admissible in all state and Federal courts and tribunals of the United States (1 U.S.C. 113). These slip laws contain additional information and context obtained through the publishing process including legal statutory citations, marginal notes and citations, and a legislative history. Visit Help to learn more about the Public and Private Laws collection.

Below is an example of related Congressional Record documents linked to the details page for 163 Cong. Rec H5373 – Public Bills and Resolutions from June 29, 2017.

Up to 1,000 Results through the API: As a direct response to user feedback and a priority to make accessing content from GovInfo easier for the developer community, the maximum “pageSize” limit was increased from the previous limit of 100 now up to 1,000 results for collections, packages, and granules endpoints. This allows API users to get more results in a single request.

Cataloged Born-Digital Content: Part of GPO’s Cataloging and Indexing Program (44 U.S.C. §§ 1710, 1902-1903) includes standard processes that catalog and also capture digital versions of Federal government publications. For this release, GovInfo developed the capability to ingest and process this content into the preservation repository, create metadata using the available cataloging records, and then make the publications available on the public site. An initial set of content is now available on the public site. Here is an example of some of the catalogued publications available in GovInfo from the Department of Agriculture. Generally, the catalogued publications in this set are published by a variety of Federal agencies, cover a myriad of topics, and have published dates ranging from the current decade back to the 1800s. Explore them all from the search results here.

To the right is the cover page of a cataloged publication, 'The Story of Dinosaur Lake: The Purgatoire Valley Dinosaur Tracksite.'

Additional Enhancements:

• Upgraded the internal content management system (CMS).
• Developed functionality to apply optical character recognition (OCR) to publicly available PDFs that were not OCRed prior to submission for select collections.
• Built the capability to detect invalid PDFs for deposited content prior to submission for select collections.
• Resolved an issue with the Federal Register (FR) collection where full issue PDFs were truncated.
• Upgraded the file format identification tool (DROID).
• Updated the XML Metadata Editor to support various collection changes.
• Implemented a change so that addenda for Congressional hearings now sort correctly in browse and document in context.
• Updated the Related Resources, links, and the text of resource descriptions on collection browse pages to ensure accuracy and uniformity.
• Updated RSS feeds publication date information to use the “last modified” time.
• Incorporated improvements to provide customized, collection-specific Chicago-style references for the bibliographic citation generator functionality.
• Applied a fix within the Congressional Bills collection where Congressional Reports citations were not being parsed.
• Updated the Congressional Hearings collection to update the access ID correctly when metadata changes are made to the congress element.
• Added Statutes Compilations events to bulk data sitemaps.
• Added the Interim Resume of Congressional Activity to the Congressional Record Link Service.
• Updated the Congressional Committee Prints collection to persist print numbers after reprocessing.
• Resovled an issue with metadata persistence and Joint Committee citations for the Congressional Committee Prints collection.
• Made improvements to the XML Metadata Editor “Help” styling and other aesthetic changes.
• Updated the XML Metadata Editor for the Congressional Committee Prints collection to persist changes to subtitle metadata values after a reprocess.
• Performed an upgrade on public facing frameworks.
• Updated the Congressional Hearings collection schema to add video URL metadata information.
• Updated Congressional Bills, the Congressional Record, and the Economic Indicators collections to correctly apply the issued date through the publisher component.
• Resolved an issue within the Congressional Hearings collection browse where Joint Economic Committee hearings were incorrectly showing up under Senate Hearings.
• Resolved an issue on the Serial Set collection browse page where UNT titles with quotation marks were not appearing properly.
• Resolved a problem that removed thumbnail alt tag and title attribute values so that the values now display correctly.
• Improved the display of buttons for Federal Register results within the citation search feature.
• Enhanced the advanced search functionality to properly display digitized Congressional Reports from within the Serial Set collection when using Reports criteria.
• Built functionality to properly display full Unicode characters on the user interface including emoji.
• Created functionality to use citations with the advanced search form, specifically over the Other, or “miscellaneous government publications”, collection.
• Implemented important and routine component upgrades, license and software updates, and security enhancements.