March 2023 Release Notes

The first deployment of the year included 99 individually tracked changes and concluded another busy cycle for the GovInfo team. The release featured a new Related Documents use case for Congressional committee prints to associated committee prints, a variety of new content both digitized and born digital, an application framework update, numerous collection and system enhancements, bug fixes, and much more.

New Content: Over 37,000 content packages (roughly equivalent to one bound printed document) were made available from the period of January 1 to March 31. Notable submissions since the last release included the Select January 6th Committee Final Report and Supporting Materials Collection; the United States Government Manual (December 2022 Edition); the Congressional Directory for the 117th Congress; the Budget of the U.S. Government FY 2024 and associated publications; the Economic Report of the President, 2023; the Fall 2022 Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions; interim packages for the Privacy Act Issuances collection; 8,400 digitized Serial Set reports and documents, digitized Congressional hearings and Congressional directories; additional Railroad Retirement Board publications; additional GPO partnership publications; and more.

Digitized Congressional Directory: A total of 57 historical, digitized Congressional Directory editions ranging from the 101st to the 41st Congresses were made available in GovInfo this release. Additional editions will be added periodically as they are digitized. The Congressional Directory contains short biographies of each member of the Senate and the House of Representatives listed by state or district. Entries typically include committee membership, terms of service, administrative staff, and information such as room and telephone numbers. In addition, the Congressional Directory lists officials of the courts, military establishments, and other Federal departments and agencies, including D.C. government officials, governors of states and territories, foreign diplomats, and members of the press, radio and television galleries.

Below are images from the Congressional Directory for the 56th Congress (1899-1901), 2nd Session, First Edition, November 27, 1900. Learn more about the Congressional Directory here.

Partnership Publications from Boise State University: GPO partners with the Albertsons Library at Boise State University to provide access to historical publications that feature important environmental information about states of the greater Pacific Northwest such as Idaho and Oregon. A special focus of the publications in this collection are topics such as water and land studies, earthquake activity, and volcanic impacts on the region. New publications recently added included the Status of Technical Work: Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project, which contains a series of reports and data on the project that was published in 1994, and also the Willamette Basin Comprehensive Study of Water and Related Land Resources, Appendix L Water Pollution Control, which was part of a study published in 1969 that appraised the water quality of the Willamette Basin in Oregon and presented recommendations for restoring and maintaining water quality for the future.

Below are images from the Willamette Basin Comprehensive Study of Water and Related Land Resources, Appendix L Water Pollution Control, (1969).

Feature Articles: Nine feature articles were published from the period of January 1 to March 31. These included articles commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents’ Day and Black History Month. Other highlights announced the digitization of Historical Congressional Directories from the 1800s and the release of the FY 2024 Budget of the U.S. Government. There were also special featured articles including an article memorializing the 20 Years Since the Space Shuttle Columbia Accident, an update highlighting State of the Union Addresses, and a feature spotlighting the 90th Anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Inaugural Address.

Related Documents for Congressional Committee Prints Related to Other Committee Prints: The scope of GovInfo Related Documents expanded this release to include linkages from Congressional committee prints to other associated committee prints. These are now displayed on the GovInfo user interface. This relationship is especially helpful when users want to navigate to both historical and current editions of a serialized committee print. One example is the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, a joint committee print that is regularly produced by the House Committee on International Relations and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. View the other prints in the series by clicking on the Related Documents tab.

This image shows the Related Documents tab and the display for the other committee prints in the series.

GovInfo User Interface Updates: GovInfo strives to grow and innovate. As part of this goal, a major effort to migrate the user interface to a more supported, modern, and versatile framework is underway. This process will be iterative with different sections of the website migrated over time. For this release, the GovInfo search widget and the GovInfo search results display were migrated to a new framework. Benefits include improved accessibility, an updated look and feel, and navigation enhancements. We encourage you to share your feedback so that we can continue to improve your experience.

This image displays a side-by-side view of the new and old GovInfo search widgets.

An image of the new GovInfo Search Results is below.

Congressionally Mandated Reports: Following enactment of the legislative measure for the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act (ACMRA) this past December, GPO began the design phase to implement new functionality outlined in the legislation. Most notably, this includes a new electronic document submission mechanism for Federal agencies to submit statutorily-required reports and metadata directly to GPO, which will then be made available to the public on GovInfo. More information about GPO’s ACMRA implementation will be shared in the coming months.

Additional Enhancements:

• Updated parsers for standard references, president, member, and committee metadata.
• Updated API granule MODS URLs.
• Resolved an issue with the Serial Set API that displayed a blank collection name value.
• Updated various parsing rules in the Federal Register collection including making adjustments for Billing Code and President fields.
• Resolved an issue with the Federal Register collection that truncated document titles after certain special characters.
• Ensured consistency of Congressional Bills title display.
• Updated the U.S. Code Link Service functionality to allow string values for Title and Section annotations.
• Updated navigators for the Federal Register so they do not display “null” values for volumes published via non-standard methods.
• Added support for multiple department document identifiers in Federal Register MODs metadata.
• Updated headers on Congressional Hearings collection details pages to match the values for line one in search results.
• Resolved an issue for granule Access IDs for Congressional Hearings packages containing volume numbers in Roman numerals.
• Updated the preferred citation and default display of title for the Congressional Hearings details page display.
• Updated the Congressional Hearings display of Help values on details pages for hearing “sub type.”
• Made changes to allow {PM/typeOfResource} to have additional values in the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection.
• Added standard references metadata to the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection.
• Added new MARC field transforms to the Bulk Government Publications collection.
• Added an additional subject metadata to the Miscellaneous Government Publications MODs metadata that will identify people who are the subject of documents.
• Made changes to prevent empty Congressional Reports and Congressional Calendars elements in the Congressional Bills collection.
• Updated the XML Metadata Editor for the Congressional Directory collection to make package metadata classification fields editable.
• Updated the Congressional Directory collection to incorporate the word “Congress” into line one of the search results display.
• Updated the Congressional Committee Prints collection to set chamber to “House” for the House Rules and Administration committee’s prints.
• Resolved an issue related to the Congressional Record browse display.
• Resolved an issue related to the Government Manual browse display.
• Added new and updated values for the Congressional Bills metadata for bills’ short titles.
• Added preferred titles for certain documents within the Statute Compilations collection.
• Implemented automation for certain internal content management system processes.
• Resolved an issue related to processing Bill Status XML bulk data that created duplicated packages when the internal processing parameter “NewOnly” is set to “true.”
• Optimized the display of image links on on committee browse pages below Congressional Committee Print browse nodes.
• Deployed an update to the USLM XML schema and table module.
• Resolved issues for Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, and eCFR SGML to XML character conversions for certain characters – en dash, em dash, and carets.
• Made various updates to the XML Metadata Editor to support key elements for the Bulk Government Publications collection.
• Performed updates related to web application content delivery and other web services.
• Performed various software and security upgrades on multiple internal and external components.