December 2023 Release Notes

The December GovInfo release was technologically and strategically productive, including 103 individually tracked system changes. Release highlights included the much-anticipated public launch of the new Congressionally Mandated Reports collection, further migration of web application functionality to a new framework, initial development for a major update of historical digitized U.S. Statutes at Large content, customizations for agency-submitted content, security patches and component upgrades, design improvements, collection and system enhancements, bug fixes, and more.

GovInfo Achieves CoreTrustSeal Certification: In addition to the deployment, also in December 2023, GPO’s GovInfo achieved certification as a Trustworthy Data Repository by the CoreTrustSeal Standards and Certification Board. The process for this certification is rigorous and only achieved by data repositories that meet the substantial requirements. This certification adds to GovInfo’s repertoire of credentials which notably includes maintaining global status as an ISO 16363 Certified Trustworthy Digital Repository since December 2019.

New Content: Over 55,000 content packages (roughly equivalent to one bound printed document) were made available from the period of October 1 to December 31. Notable submissions since the last release included the 2023 Report to Congress of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission; S. Doc. 118-8 - Report of the Secretary of the Senate: April 1, 2023 to September 30, 2023, Part I and Part II; the CFR Index and Finding Aids for 2023; the 2020 edition of the Journal of the House of Representatives; 7,504 digitized U.S. Congressional Serial Set reports, documents, and journals; 95 born-digital content packages that were acquired through GPO’s Cataloging and Indexing Program; 697 digitized Congressional Hearings; interim packages for the Privacy Act Issuances collection; 12 Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) publications; 20 Railroad Retirement Board publications; 25 National Security Agency's The Next Wave publications; partnership publications from Boise State University such as the Columbia River Water Management Report for Water Year 1976 and Consumptive Use of Water in the Irrigable Areas of the Columbia River Basin in Nevada; partnership publications from the Department of Energy's Source Term Subcommittee: May 1988-September 1994 and Environmental Transport Subcommittee: May 1988-September 1994; partnership publications from the University of Memphis produced by the Peace Corps; and more.

Feature Articles: Eleven feature articles were published from the period of October 1 to December 31. These included articles commemorating or memorializing World Mental Health Day, World Digital Preservation Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, the 60th Anniversary of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the 35th Anniversary of World Aids Day, National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, 50 Years of conservation with the Endangered Species Act, and feature highlights on the Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay, the Fall 2023 Federal Depository Library Conference, and the public launch of the Congressionally Mandated Reports collection in GovInfo.

Launch of Congressionally Mandated Reports: Development occurred throughout the year that finally culminated in the much-anticipated deployment in this release of full features and functionality for the new Congressionally Mandated Reports collection. This functionality was driven by requirements mandated for the Government Publishing Office (GPO) within the “Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act” (ACMRA) of Public Law 117-263 - James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, sections 7241-7248) enacted in December 2022.

As part of the ACMRA, Federal agencies must now directly submit in-scope congressionally mandated reports to GPO using a customized submission portal. The reports then go through GPO workflows and backend processing to be made available to the public on GovInfo all in one place for the first time. The hallmark GovInfo search functionalities were built for the Congressionally Mandated Reports collection including specialized advanced search form fields, custom filters, and use of collection-specific metadata to power the user experience such as title, issuing agency, publication date, date submitted to Congress, and more. Other features are also available, such as the ability to download additional formats of reports and data in either CSV and JSON formats, bulk download through GovInfo’s API or sitemaps, the ability to browse reports by issuing agency, and also an alternative ability to browse reports by topic, which are assigned to a report by agencies upon submission to GPO. Learn more about searching the Congressionally Mandated Reports collection from the GovInfo Help information here.

Migration to New Web Application Framework Continues: The process continues for migrating the user interface to a more supported, modern, and versatile framework. Efforts began in early 2023 with a plan to migrate sections gradually over time. In this release, the team completed a migration of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set topic browse (and new Congressionally Mandated Reports topic browse) to the new public web framework that will allow 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 public functionality, including browse and content details, to the new framework.

Customizations for National Security Agency (NSA) Content: The NSA leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both signals intelligence (SIGINT) insights and cybersecurity products and services, and NSA enables computer network operations to gain a decisive advantage for the nation and our allies. GPO now provides access to The Next Wave, NSA’s research and technological innovation journal, via GovInfo. In this release, GPO made customizations to enable the NSA’s The Next Wave to be submitted and made publicly accessible with other content. Browse these journals on the NSA collection page and search the new NSA content here.

Additional Enhancements:

• Added a “relatedLink” field to API Search Service results for collections with available relationships to improve discovery of related content and metadata.
• Improved the GovInfo API documentation by providing enhanced error messages and an easier-to-follow example for the API Search Service.
• Improved the API Search Service sorting options to ensure improved consistency.
• Fixed an issue with searching and applying filters in which a user could be directed to an empty search results page; users will now be returned to the first page of results after filters are applied.
• Standardized the U.S. Code collection “subtype” to use title case in search results filters.
• Improved the handling of thumbnails on search results pages so that a superfluous download button was not created.
• Updated search results to label USLM files as USLM instead of XML.
• Made a minor update to the search results page to prevent a generic “Not Found” message from displaying for an edge case.
• Updated the search results page for certain Budget of the U.S. Government collection results to return details and share buttons even if there are no content renditions.
• Implemented internal GPO email notifications for the Congressionally Mandated Reports collection pre-processing validation so that appropriate GPO staff can fix identified issues.
• Integrated Personally Identified Information (PII) scanning, specifically for social security numbers (SSN), as part of the pre-processing validation steps for the Congressionally Mandated Reports collection.
• Created functionality to allow internal users to disable a text file conversion to HTML for packages submitted through the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection, resulting in public users seeing native text files where appropriate.
• Updated the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection Government Authors and SuDoc parser.
• Updated the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection metadata transform to support changes to the subject attribute.
• Built out initial functionality for internal components to support the submission of pre-1951 digitized U.S. Statutes at Large content.
• Updated the U.S. Statutes at Large collection to improve the appearance of content detail pages for front matter and back matter.
• Added support for the Treaty granule class in the U.S. Statutes at Large collection to support needs for ingest of upcoming pre-1951 digitized Statutes at Large content.
• Updated the U.S. Statutes at Large collection metadata and display to support special sessions in older volumes.
• Improved processing of BILLSTATUS collection information to ensure all “recordedVotes” are captured (GitHub 223).
• Configured the Congressional Bills collection to force download non-USLM XML files that are larger than 1MB.
• Added the ability to designate the authority for subjects in the internal XML metadata editor, allowing users to better understand the authority associated with a particular subject’s controlled vocabulary.
• Improved the user experience when expanding the search widget on multiple pages so that the user is automatically brought to the top of the page to see the widget when it is selected.
• Conducted a successful integrity check on the GovInfo repository’s digital objects, with a result of no integrity issues for digital objects.
• Upgraded DROID’s PRONOM signature definition files to support improved file format identification.
• Made improvements to the internal XML metadata editor to enhance metadata persistence for the U.S. Congressional Serial Set collection.
• Updated the Congressional Reports collection parser to capture subtitles in descriptive metadata (MODS) files.
• Enabled the capability to export content packages within the internal submission interface of the repository.
• Added new a new preferred title for the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023 in the Statute Compilations collection.
• Added improved user-readable values on search results filters and in advanced search for certain Congressional Record collection entry types, including Text of Individual House Amendments, Statements on Individual Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions, Text of Individual Senate Amendments, and Call to Order.
• Improved status codes in the responses for Bulk Data repository error pages.
• Performed various software and security upgrades on multiple internal and external components to ensure that the system performs optimally and to reduce risk to preservation and public access.