September 2024 Release Notes

The late summer release for GovInfo included 85 individually tracked system changes. Highlights were functionality to create RSS feeds based on search criteria, design improvements for mobile button display, browse updates that include migrating the Public and Private Laws collection to the new web application framework, as well as security patches and component upgrades, design improvements, collection and system enhancements, bug fixes, and more.

New Content: Over 101,000 content packages (roughly equivalent to one bound printed document) were made available from July 1 to September 30. Notable submissions include the Spring 2024 Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions; United States Statutes at Large, Volume 133, 116th Congress, 1st Session; Volume 38, No. 8-9 of the FCC Record: A comprehensive compilation of decisions, reports, public notices and other documents of the Federal Communications Commission of the United States; 100 reports submitted by Federal agencies into the new Congressionally Mandated Reports collection (bringing the total to over 500); 10,784 born-digital documents that were acquired through GPO’s Cataloging and Indexing Program; judicial opinions from the U.S. District Court Western District of Wisconsin (WIWD); over 45,000 digitized U.S. Congressional Serial Set reports, documents, and journals; over 1,000 digitized Congressional Hearings; interim packages for the Privacy Act Issuances collection; Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) publications; and more.

The image below features some of the covers from the batch of born-digital packages acquired through GPO’s Cataloging and Indexing Program and submitted to GovInfo this quarter.

Feature Articles: Nine feature articles were published from July 1 to September 30. These include articles commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the First Woman to Command a Space Shuttle Mission, the 55th Anniversary of the Landing on the Moon, and the 60th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as articles celebrating Labor Day, World Humanitarian Day, Purple Heart Day, and Independence Day. There were also features for the June 2024 GovInfo Release Notes and National History Day® 2024-2025.

RSS Feeds Based on Searches: As part of this release, the team created the ability to generate an RSS feed based on a specific set of GovInfo search results. RSS functionality helps users track new content and updates that are of particular interest. For any search, select the RSS button at the top-right of the search results to generate a custom RSS feed that can be used with a feed reader. This will work similarly to the existing standard RSS feeds, including direct links to content files and the content details page for each result.

Example: A user wants to receive an RSS feed update when there is an new document available in GovInfo that matches a search for specific rulemaking documents from the Federal Register. When a new proposed rule, notice of proposed rulemaking, final rule, etc., is issued for an associated Regulation Identification Number (RIN), that user would be able get the RSS update with the newly available document that matches this criteria.

The search-based RSS feeds support keywords or fielded searches, including those executed from the Advanced Search.

Steps:

• Perform the desired search, including applying any filters. For example rinnumber:1506-AB54, then filter on Federal Register. Here is a link to those results.
• Click on the RSS icon at the top right corner of the search page.
• A pop-up message displays, “RSS feed URL copied to clipboard”.
• Open an RSS feed reader and add the URL from the clipboard. There are many free and paid RSS feed readers available that can be found with a normal Internet search.
• See the results (up to the initial 100) and as new content becomes available, the results will appear in the RSS feed. Here is what the RSS feed looks like when viewed in a browser.

For more information on this, see the GovInfo Feeds page.

Note that different RSS readers will differ in the appearance of the RSS display. Below are images of some examples.

Mobile View Update for Buttons with Multiple File Types: Releases always feature design improvements based on reported findings from user feedback or known issues with the interface. In this case, there was an unintended wrapping of button placement on mobile devices for documents with more than three file types. The example in the image below shows a PDF, HTML/Text, XML, and USLM XML version of the same enrolled Congressional bill. Due to limited space on mobile devices, the wrapping did not function properly. Users will now see a "View " drop-down button displaying file type options. The GovInfo team is continually identifying areas for improvements to design and navigation like this.

This image shows the before and after display of the mobile buttons.

Migration to New Web Application Framework Continues: Work to migrate the user interface to a more supported, modern, and versatile framework continues. In the last release, the Congressional Bills collection browse page was migrated. For this release, the Public and Private Laws collection browse page was migrated to the new web application framework, allowing for more effective reuse of components across the site. In addition to the increased consistency for public user experience, this supports decreased development effort for maintenance and facilitates subsequent enhancements. In future releases, the team will migrate additional major functionality, with a focus on continuing work on collection browse pages and then content details pages.

Additional Enhancements:

• Updated the icon library utilized by the web application framework.
• Improved how Congress session years’ metadata are parsed during submission and displayed throughout the site for the Congressional Documents, Congressional Reports, and House Manual and Senate Manual collections.
• Resolved an issue with the browse functionality for sorting and displaying document buttons in the Additional Government Publications collection.
• Implemented GovInfo collection browse URL refactoring improvements.
• Updated preprocessing content containers for the Miscellaneous Government Publication collection submissions.
• Added the ability to better parse the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection authors based on date ranges.
• Created new and enhanced older automated GovInfo integration tests to ensure code quality is built into future development and deployments.
• Created automated integration test cases for Date Browse, Congressional Serial Set Topic Browse, and Advanced Search functionalities.
• Improved automated monitoring of sitemap and RSS generation exceptions.
• Extended the support and updates for specific collection workflow processes and cross-systems integration, specifically regarding the Congressionally Mandated Reports collection.
• Updated daily and monthly reports for internal stakeholders to include the additional collections or metadata.
• Improved the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management custom search widget design based on stakeholder testing feedback.
• Improved bill number parsing inconsistencies for the Congressional Documents collection.
• Continued updating the internal GovInfo Style Guide to incorporate user interface colors and typography.
• Updated the GovInfo processor to add page count metadata for all collections with PDF renditions and the handling of PM/pageCount across all collections.
• Improved how Bill Status XML Bulk Data files are sorted on the Bulk Data Repository.
• Updated the Bill Status and Bill Summary Bulk Data collections’ processors to disable access to external entities in XML parsing.
• Corrected some labeling for the U.S. Statutes at Large collection Bulk Data functionality.
• Made improvements to parsing for the Federal Register collection to recognize content from the Unified Agenda as Proposed Rules.
• Refactored parsers for the Congressional Record, Federal Register, Public and Private Laws, and United States Code collections to improve performance and maintainability.
• Resolved an issue with search filters when values contain quotation marks.
• Resolved an issue with the U.S. Statutes at Large collection where titles were cut off at apostrophes.
• Updated the collection RSS feeds to have a more consistent recommendation for RSS clients to poll for new content every fifteen minutes.
• Updated the House Journal, Additional Government Publications, Congressional Hearings, and Miscellaneous Government Publications collections schema and internal XML metadata editor to support the PCS/Congress attribute.
• Updated the House Journal collection to support multiple states' metadata to be attributed to one member.
• Made improvements to the internal content management system to ease the upload process for internal users.
• Enhanced the web content update process for updating the collection browse and related resources information.
• Upgraded the Droid and signature files in the internal content management system.
• Applied speaker last name exceptions into the Congressional Record parser.
• Implemented the ability to delete a submitted rendition folder in the archival area of the internal content management system.
• Fixed an issue with the Committee Name field in the Congressional Committee Prints collection parser.
• Modified the search widget tab hover appearance.
• Updated the Swagger user interface that powers the Link Service and API pages.
• Updated PDF digital signature profiles for non-standard document dimensions in the Public Papers of the Presidents collection.
• Deployed an update to the USLM XML schema, stylesheet, and converter.
• Updated the workflow for processing cataloged harvested documents to include an additional target URL.
• Made various updates to the internal XML metadata editor and content management system.
• Performed updates related to web application content delivery and other web services.
• Performed various software and security upgrades on multiple internal and external components.