December 2024 Release Notes

The December 2024 GovInfo release included 73 individually tracked system changes. Some highlights were integrating Congressional hearings submitted through the bulk submission process into the main hearings’ collection browse structure and migrating the Congressional Calendars, Hearings, Reports, and the Congressionally Mandated Reports collections’ browse pages to the new web application framework. Others included backend development for the upcoming Judicial branch collection of U.S. Reports of the Supreme Court of the United States, making the first batch of USLM XML files available for the digitized Statutes at Large, adding Congress and session to the browse nodes list on the Congressional Record browse page, as well as security patches and component upgrades, design improvements, collection and system enhancements, bug fixes, and more.

New Content: Over 30,000 content packages (roughly equivalent to one bound printed document) were made available from October 1 to December 31. Notable submissions include the S. Doc. 118-13 - Report of the Secretary of the Senate: April 1, 2024 through September 30, 2024, Part I and Part II; the 2021 edition of the Journal of the House of Representatives; Volume 38, No. 10-14 and Volume 39 No. 1-4 of the FCC Record: A comprehensive compilation of decisions, reports, public notices and other documents of the Federal Communications Commission of the United States; 95 reports submitted by Federal agencies into the new Congressionally Mandated Reports collection (bringing the total to over 600); judicial opinions from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court District of Connecticut (CTB); 128 digitized U.S. Congressional Serial Set reports, documents, and journals; over 1,520 digitized Congressional Committee Prints; digitized Congressional Pictorial Directories back to 1951; interim packages for the Privacy Act Issuances collection; Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) publications; publications made available through a GPO partnership with Utah State University Libraries and Military Technical Manuals made available through a GPO partnership with University of North Texas Libraries; and more.

The image below features covers from some of the publications submitted to GovInfo this quarter.

Feature Articles: GPO published thirteen feature articles from October 1 to December 31. These include an article showcasing Mesa Verde National Park; features commemorating World Digital Preservation Day, Veterans Day, America Recycles Day, Thanksgiving, National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, and Human Rights Day; an article recognizing National Disability Employment Awareness Month; an In Memoriam for President Carter; and news updates about the availability of the latest United State Policy and Supporting Positions (PLUM) Book and historical Congressional Pictorial Directories.

Integrated Additional Hearings into the Congressional Hearings Collection Browse: During this release, the team integrated congressional hearings that are submitted to GovInfo through the bulk content submission process into the “day-forward” Congressional Hearings collection browse page. This important feature enables workflow flexibility that comes with making harvested or one-off hearings available in GovInfo, and also ensures logical discoverability of content that belongs together but is processed differently. Ultimately, this means easier access to hearings for users.

United States Reports of the Supreme Court: The GovInfo team began development activities on the internal components for an exciting new Judicial branch collection in this release. The collection will be comprised of Volumes 2 (1791) through 501 (1990) of the U.S. Reports of the Supreme Court of the United States. U.S. Reports are the official, bound reports of decisions by the Supreme Court, and GPO is looking forward to making this important content available within the GovInfo content universe in 2025.

Initial Digitized Statutes at Large Volumes in USLM XML: The U.S. Statutes at Large collection is now able to support USLM XML format for digitized volumes 1 (1789) through volume 116 (2002). This builds upon the work done last year to provide access to the complete corpus of historical Statutes content. The Statutes at Large is the permanent collection of all laws and resolutions enacted during each session of Congress and assembled in chronological order. USLM offers a standard XML schema that promotes interoperability among documents as they flow through the legislative and regulatory processes. The new Statutes USLM files are able to be accessed through the basic and advanced search functionality as well as on the Statutes browse page, in addition to being available on the Bulk Data site and through the public API. The USLM XML for digitized Statutes at Large volumes will be released incrementally over time.

The image below shows digitized Statutes at Large search results and browse page with the USLM XML format buttons.

Congress and Session Now Visible on Browse: Feedback from users is critical to ensuring that GovInfo is meeting the needs of the communities it serves. The browse page navigation for the Congressional Record previously only listed the year and volume number for Congresses. Congress number and Congress session, however, are also essential identifiers that immediately let a user key off of that information to drill down into the Record documents they require. Adding these to the browse was a way to fill this gap and help users get what they need faster. The image below shows the before and after displays for Congress number and Congress session.

This image shows the before and after display of the Congressional Record browse page.

Migration to New Web Application Framework Progresses: The migration to a more supported, modern, and versatile web application framework continues. For this release, the team focused on migrating the Congressional Calendars, Congressional Hearings, Congressional Reports, and the Congressionally Mandated Reports collections’ browse pages. During this process, styling improvements are also considered and incorporated. The team will continue working on other collections’ browse pages in the coming releases and then move on to migrating content details pages. This effort supports consistency, easier maintenance, and the ability to seamlessly build out future enhancements.

Additional Enhancements:

• Provided access to merged Social Security Act and Public Health Service Act Statute Compilations and updated the collection Help information.
• Updated the icon library utilized by the web application framework.
• Updated the U.S. Statutes at Large collection to better reflect public and private law and chapter citation values for pre-1957 content.
• Enabled persistence of metadata edits for the Miscellaneous Government Publication collection to ensure that edits made to the metadata are retained in the event of re-processing.
• Performed code refactoring on the parsers for the Congressional Hearings, Congressional Documents, Congressional Calendars, Serial Set, and Code of Federal Regulations collections.
• Updated the selector styling on mobile devices on the migrated browse pages.
• Upgraded the internal web curation tool and content management system.
• Made corrections to the Bulk Data repository for the 118th Congress and added the 119th Congress.
• Fixed a truncation issue with the History of Bills titles.
• Fixed a typo on the Link Service page.
• Updated the U.S. Statute Compilations browse and Help pages’ text based on stakeholder requests.
• Upgraded the internal components that powers the GovInfo publication linking functionality.
• Fixed issues with the functionality to download search results for CSV and JSON and added the 119th Congress to Bulk Data.
• Added a link break between results in the functionality to download search results.
• Updated the public API “related” endpoint to include a linkage for Congressional Reports to Congressional Bills and also to Public and Private Laws.
• Improved the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection author lookup algorithm.
• Enhanced submission validation in the content management system for PDF files.
• Created a new custom metrics report at the request of stakeholders.
• Made an improvement to ensure that the collection browse pages’ Related Resources external links open in new tab.
• Implemented GovInfo collection browse URL refactoring improvements.
• Created new integration tests and resolved issues with older tests.
• Performed updates related to web application content delivery and other web services.
• Performed various software and security upgrades on multiple internal and external components.