June 2021 Release Notes

For our June 2021 release, the govinfo team focused on major development to support the upcoming Serial Set collection. This release included 94 individually tracked changes since our March 2021 release. The team’s work will be available to the public with the release of the Congressional Serial Set collection in September 2021. This article highlights some of the work performed by the team over the past three months, including the development of a bibliographic citation generator to help users cite documents from govinfo in academic works, new API parameters to provide more focused retrievals of USCOURTS content, and other minor enhancements.

New Content: Over 37,000 content packages (roughly equivalent to one bound printed document) have been made available since the beginning of April. Notable content made available since the last release include the Public Papers of the President for 2015, book 1; the Fiscal Year 2022 Budget of the United States Government; enhanced HTML versions of the Congressional Record Index from 1983-2011; and judicial opinions from the U.S. District Court of Delaware (DED), U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Montana (MTB), U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky (KYEB), and U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas (ARWD).

Feature Articles: Eleven articles were featured since early April, including articles commemorating the addition of the Juneteenth National Independence Day as the first new federal holiday since 1983; the 65th Anniversary of the Federal Highway Act; showcasing the new govinfo API Related Documents Service as well as articles recognizing Autism Acceptance Month, Earth Day, Armed Forces Day, Mental Health Awareness Month, Memorial Day, and Flag Day.

Serial Set Collection Development: GPO is partnering with the Law Library of Congress to bring historic, digitized documents from the Congressional Serial Set into govinfo. The Congressional Serial Set contains historic documents and reports from the House and Senate since the 15th Congress (1817). For more information about the content, see our Serial Set help page. This partnership has entailed in-depth discussions and analysis of the content, work to assemble and prepare metadata to ensure that the documents are not only available, but easily accessible, and efforts to integrate the documents into each part of the govinfo interface.

During this release, the govinfo team performed system-wide development activities for the Serial Set collection including building a sustainable packaging and ingest process, creating metadata aggregators and parsers, updating content processors for preservation and access, indexing the content and metadata within the search engine, and developing a means of public access via search and browse as well as developer-focused functionality via the govinfo API.

The initial launch is planned for September 2021, and after this initial release, GPO and the Law Library of Congress will continue to add content from additional Congresses.

Bibliographic Citation Generator: Over the years, the govinfo user community has requested the ability to generate bibliographic citations for content on govinfo. As part of this release, users can easily generate citations through each document’s content details page. Supported citation formats include MLA, APA, and the Chicago Manual of Style. Additionally, we have added embedded metadata on our content details pages to allow users of reference tools like Zotero and Mendeley to import documents and reference information for later use.

Example of Document Citations

Additional Citation Search Patterns for Congressional Reports: As of this release, new citation search patterns are now supported for the Congressional Reports collections on govinfo. Expanding options for citation patterns supports flexibility with how users prefer or are taught to structure citations within a search. View all supported citation search patterns, including examples for each within the govinfo Help information for Congressional Reports. Please note that these changes require content to be republished for the updates to take effect, and this will be completed over a period of time.

Additional Enhancements

In additions to the work above, there were a number of minor functional, design, and security enhancements, such as the following:

• Enhanced consistency in how view entire publication functionality is displayed across the site.
• Improved spacing on search results page for the clear button on the search navigators.
• Added new API parameters to allow filtering USCOURTS packages by state/courtType/courtCode within the collections and published endpoints.
• Made improvements to how CREC granules are parsed for speakers with leading initials.
• Integrated CDIR browse to include 104th Congress GPO collection package.
• Added the following copyright rights statement to PREMIS metadata for new and updated content: Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government pursuant to Title 17 United States Code chapter 1 section 105l. For more information, see the govinfo copyright policy.
• Performed tuning activities for analytics and metrics reporting.
• Conducted a semi-annual data integrity validation check which scanned the data in the repository and verified that there were no issues. Consistency and integrity checks are two monitoring and reporting mechanisms that are in place to validate content integrity and provenance (i.e. the chain of custody and all events within that chain).