June 2023 Release Notes

The GovInfo team kicked off the summer with the second deployment of the year that included 90 individually tracked changes. Featured enhancements during this busy cycle were comprised of a new date navigation feature for the Federal Register Table of Contents, a Related Documents API endpoint for Congressional committee prints to associated committee prints, user interface design improvements, numerous collection and system enhancements, bug fixes, and much more.

New Content: Over 47,000 content packages (roughly equivalent to one bound printed document) were made available from the period of April 1 to June 30. Notable submissions since the last release included S. Pub. 117-11 - Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, First Session of the One Hundred and Seventeenth Congress; S. Doc. 117-12 - Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation for 2022; S. Pub. 118-2 - Senate Class List for the 118th Congress; S. Pub. 118-3 - Senate Committee and Subcommittee Assignments for the 118th Congress; S. Doc 118-2 - Secretary Report of the Senate for Part I and Part II; GPO Annual Report for 2022; CFR Index and Finding Aids for 2022; Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) – Environment Studies Series publications; digitized Depository Library Shipping Lists; interim packages for the Privacy Act Issuances collection; over 2,300 Serial Set reports and documents; digitized Congressional hearings and Congressional directories; additional Railroad Retirement Board publications; additional GPO partnership publications; and more.

Feature Articles: Eight feature articles were published from the period of April 1 to June 30. These included articles commemorating Earth Day, Arbor Day, Memorial Day, Flag Day, and the Juneteenth celebration. Other highlights announced the 30th Anniversary of the GPO Access Legislation, showcased the 130th Anniversary of the Chicago World’s Fair, and featured content available in GovInfo from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) Environmental Studies Program.

Federal Register Date Picker: We built a useful new way to select any date on which an issue of the Federal Register was published directly from the Federal Register Table of Contents page. This facilitates a much easier process for users to explore issues of the daily Federal Register.

Below is a screen capture displaying the new Federal Register Table of Contents date picker functionality.

New GovInfo API Relationships: Users of the GovInfo API can now find related Federal Register documents from individual Code of Federal Regulations sections based on citation references. For example, if you want to learn more about the regulatory process around 21 CFR 352.10 “Sunscreen active ingredients”, requesting the available relationships would show a number of Federal Register citations. Here is a list of related Federal Register documents.

Additionally, API users can now identify related Congressional committee prints that share the same series as other Congressional committee prints. For example, requesting the related committee prints for the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices will return additional documents within the series.

Providing access to documents is a key feature of GovInfo. We are continually enhancing and exposing the relationships between documents within GovInfo to help users understand the way different documents, agencies, and branches interact with one another.

Improved Visual Indicators for “Visited” Buttons on Search Results: We have made visual changes on the user interface to make it more clear for users to know which search results they have accessed previously by slightly modifying the “visited button” styling and colors. This is useful for those who are reviewing many results at one time and are trying to keep track of their progress.

Below is a screen capture displaying the new visited button styling.

Additional Enhancements:

• Implemented various enhancements to improve display of the search results and the search widget.
• Improved the user experience by adjusting the speed within the "scroll to top" functionality on GovInfo web pages.
• Implemented support for pagination on the House Select January 6th Committee Final Report and Supporting Materials Collection browse page.
• Improved handling of “smart quotes” within search queries from mobile devices.
• Added preferred citations within the Congressional Hearings collection for Serial and House Armed Services Committee content.
• Standardized the display of Congressional hearing title and citation information across browse, search results, and content details.
• Provided access to XML format in package-level Federal Register search results.
• Updated the U.S. Statutes at Large collection schema to improve metadata and display of Congress, session, and year information on the collection browse page.
• Upgraded the internal web curation tool and content management system.
• Created PREMIS events to support repository curation activities.
• Enhanced processing mechanisms to support U.S. Code content that contains multiple PDF files within the submission information packages.
• Began developing new pre-ingest file and metadata validation functionality.
• Incorporated initial automated scanning processes to flag specific information in the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection prior to ingest.
• Added a flag for the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection to indicate when a package fails digital signing.
• Incorporated PDF file and issue date validation processes for the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection.
• Enhanced parsing for the U.S. Congressional Serial Set collection to identify personal subjects.
• Enabled the application of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on certain digitized Congressional hearings.
• Improved parsing for multiple billing codes in a Federal Register document.
• Updated digital signature functionality to accommodate new signing certificates.
• Added publish date metadata to package-level U.S. Statutes at Large collection search results.
• Made minor updates to the GovInfo Link Service error page to improve user awareness of errors.
• Added Public and Private Law references to the Code of Federal Regulations content details pages, where available.
• Resolved an issue in the GovInfo API where “lastModified” would intermittently return as future dates.
• Set “offsetMark” as default for granules links in the GovInfo API package summaries.
• Performed updates related to web application content delivery and other web services.
• Performed various software and security upgrades on multiple internal and external components.

COMING SOON:

GovInfo API Search Service: The team is working on implementing a highly-requested feature for the Govinfo API to allow users to perform API searches to retrieve a set of results similar to those possible on the main GovInfo search user interface. The GovInfo team will release sample requests and responses on our GitHub repository in the coming months, and we are very interested in hearing feedback from the community.

Congressionally Mandated Reports: Development is underway to support GPO’s implementation of requirements within the “Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act” (Public Law 117-263, James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, sections 7241-7248OMB M-23-17 "Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act" Implementation Guidance, issued on June 21, 2023. Agencies will submit reports to GPO and these reports will then be made available on GovInfo. Learn more here.