March 2024 Release Notes

The early part of 2024 was a busy time for the GovInfo team and featured two separate code deployments. The releases were comprised of 106 individually tracked system changes. Highlights include the implementation of a Related Documents use case connecting reports to associated reports within the Congressionally Mandated Reports (CMR) collection, enhancements to the CMR collection based on user feedback, development to support the launch of digitized U.S. Statutes at Large volumes back to volume 1 (1789), as well as security patches and component upgrades, design improvements, collection and system enhancements, bug fixes, and more.

New Content: Over 70,000 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: issuance of the President’s Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2025; the Economic Report of the President for 2024; United States Statutes at Large Vol. 132 from the 115th Congress, 2nd Session (2018); the S. Pub. 118-5, Senate Class List; Federal Register Index for December 2023, Volume 88; CFR Index and Finding Aids for 2023; House Document 118-16, Black Americans in Congress 1870-2022; over 6,300 digitized Congressional Serial Set reports, documents, and journals; several digitized Congressional Hearings; interim packages for the Privacy Act Issuances collection; Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) publications; Railroad Retirement Board publications; National Security Agency The Next Wave publications; partnership publications; and more.

Feature Articles: Ten feature articles were published from the period of January 1 to March 31. These included articles commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, Presidents’ Day, and Women’s History Month, and articles highlighting the December GovInfo Release Notes, 60th Anniversary of the Surgeon General’s First Report on Smoking and Health, the annual celebration of National Popcorn Day, the President’s 2024 State of the Union address, and the releases of the President’s FY 2025 Budget and the 2024 Economic Report of the President.

Related Documents for Congressionally Mandated Reports and Other CMR Enhancements: In an effort to build upon the functionality that was launched in December 2023 to make the Congressionally Mandated Reports collection available on GovInfo, for this release, the GovInfo team created a new Related Documents use case. This new use case links congressionally mandated reports to other congressionally mandated reports that are part of the same series. For example, for reports that are issued as part of the same reporting requirement on a regular basis (e.g., quarterly, annually), we now display those associated reports on applicable details’ pages from the “Related Documents” tab. Below is an example for the U.S. Coast Guard’s Pribilof Island Usage and Occupancy Report to Congress, Fiscal Year 2023, which is prepared and issued on a quarterly basis throughout the fiscal year. When you locate one of the quarterly reports in search or browse results and are on a document’s details page, simply expand the Related Documents tab to see the other associated reports for this series.

These reports are connected via a piece of bibliographic metadata called an integrated library system, or ILS, number that is captured when the reports are catalogued. GovInfo has future plans to create additional Related Documents linkages using other connecting metadata between congressionally mandated reports and other reports along with other associated documents in the system. Development also included adding Congressionally Mandated Reports to the Related service endpoint in GovInfo’s API. Here is an example of the relationships in the API.

Other enhancements for the Congressionally Mandated Reports collection for this release include the following:

• Created ability to manually reprocess and produce OCR-ed text in PDF renditions of reports on a case-by-case basis.
• Added “House” or “Senate” chamber values which are displayed on details pages in front of the name of the receiving congressional committee(s) or subcommittee(s) to differentiate committees that may have a similar or even identical name across chambers.
• Updated functionality for reports to display “Report Submitted To” fields within the descriptive MODS metadata and on details page. Also created a new search operator for basic and advanced search functions for these fields. Note, the values are Congress or Committee-Subcommittee.
• Expanded the default settings for the total number of Topic navigators displayed in the advanced search.
• Improved the ability to pick up additional Congressional Report references during the processing of reports.
• Created a search field for the legal authority element values.
• Improved "target organization" for Both, Senate, and House values within the “submittedto” fields.
• Modified the browse sort order to reflect a default of “New to Old” with the new date sort function.
• Applied an accessibility fix to enable the Enter key to download the Table of Reports when using keyboard navigation.
• Applied additional search patterns for the “plawcitation” search operator, including Public Law No 117-328 and Public Law No: 117-328.
• Fixed a Topic Browse issue with opening and closing multiple nodes.

Digitized United States Statutes at Large Back to the 1st Congress (Volume 1, 1789): GPO has been working on an exciting initiative over the past two years to digitize and make volumes of the United States Statutes at Large from volume 64 (1950) back to volume 1 (1789) available on GovInfo. The Statutes at Large is the permanent collection of all laws and resolutions enacted during each session of Congress and assembled in chronological order. Until now, Statutes at Large from Volume 65, 82nd Congress (1951) to the present have been available on GovInfo. For background, GPO was given the authority to publish Statutes at Large, beginning in 1874. Prior to that time, beginning in 1845, the private firm, Little, Brown, and Company published the Statutes at Large under authority granted by a joint resolution of the 28th Congress (Res.10 of Mar.3, 1845, 5 Stat. 798). Federal depository libraries provided the bound volumes to GPO to digitize and complete the Statutes at Large digital corpus on GovInfo. As part of this initiative, and unique to what Statutes on GovInfo brings to users, files and metadata were created down to the article or “act” level. This follows the metadata creation model that was applied to digitized historical 1951-2002 Statute files published on GovInfo in 2011. The benefit is that users can target a search to locate a specific, individual act within a statute. For example, the first act enacted after the front documents (i.e., Letters, Preface, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution), is the Oaths of Office, “An Act to regulate the time and manner of administering certain oaths, June 1, 1789” (1 Stat. 23). For interesting historical context, consider exploring the letters, preface, and other preliminary pages in Volume 1 (warning: this is a large file, requiring time to load in your browser or download).

Users will notice changes over the past 235 years of the Statutes at Large. Notably, the historical Statutes at Large are not structured quite the same as the modern Statutes at Large. Here are a few examples:

• Earlier Statutes at Large volumes spanned multiple congresses and sessions. Today, a Statute at Large volume represents a single session in a single congress.
• Unique numbering did not exist in a very standardized way for the early statutes.
• Concurrent resolutions did not start appearing in the Statutes at Large until volume 28 in 1983.
• Foreign treaties were published in Statutes at Large volumes until 1948.
• Subject indexes did not appear until 1951.
• Margin notes in early volumes contained information about the history of acts in volumes 1-6. Later, margins contained subject matter and other notes, and then margin usage evolved again at an even later juncture.

It is no surprise that the Statutes at Large is a product of the times in which each volume was produced. See more information about the evolution of the Statutes at Large over time from these resources available from the Law Librarians Society of D.C. (LLSDC) website (Source and Source).

Since 1985, upon establishment of an independent National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Statutes at Large have been prepared and published by the Office of the Federal Register (OFR) under NARA. Publishing has been in partnership with the GPO who ultimately has then printed and made the Statutes at Large available on GovInfo and prior systems of digital access.

Explore the digitized historical Statutes at Large from 1950 to 1789 through searching on GovInfo and browsing the documents. There will be differences in the user interface based on the structural differences of historical and modern Statutes at Large files. This is most noticeable on the browse page and in the “document in context” area on details pages. Learn more about Statutes at Large on the GovInfo Help page.

For the next phase of development, GPO will create USLM XML for the digitized historical Statutes at Large volumes. The USLM XML will be released incrementally over time.

Federal Register Table of Contents - Enhanced Styling: As part of our ongoing efforts to migrate to a new web application framework, the Federal Register Table of Contents was migrated, and styling was enhanced. The GovInfo team worked with the Office of the Federal Register to improve the readability of the Daily Federal Register Table of Contents page by incorporating some new heading styles and layout updates. The major sections now use a section style consistent with other parts of the site offset by a horizontal line and subheadings are now displayed in a larger font with individual documents indented.

Advanced Search - Code of Federal Regulations Titles: As part of this release, the team added the full title name to the advanced search for the Code of Federal Regulations. This should help users more quickly verify that they are searching against the correct title.

Additional Enhancements:

• Added the Core Trust Seal to all GovInfo pages.
• Incorporated XML formats into the Federal Register link-type value options for Federal Register Link Service functionality.
• Migrated the Government Author, Category, and Date browse functionality to the new web application framework.
• Enhanced functionality on details pages by pointing dynamically to the appropriate publication browse pages for documents within the Additional Government Publications and Bulk collections.
• Added the National Security Agency’s publication, The Next Wave, to the appropriate GovInfo category browse area.
• Added additional terms to the authority list of terms requiring capitalization (e.g., AI and UAV).
• Expanded executive communications standard references to include chamber information. This information is available in MODS descriptive metadata.
• Improved the ability to pick up additional U.S. Code standard references during content processing.
• Applied capitalization to submitted “Frequency” metadata.
• Implemented new workflows to support automated scanning of personally identifiable information (PII) in documents.
• Made several improvements to the internal XML metadata editor including adding helper buttons for package-level elements and the “insert” functionality within the Serial Set collection.
• Improved error handling messaging in the API Related service endpoints when there are no relationships available for a given ID.
• Resolved an issue with functionality for multiple browse nodes being open on the Topic Browses and to support future collection browse migration efforts.
• Resolved an issue with the curated content search functionality where a new search was not properly going back to the first page.
• Updated the schemas and internal XML metadata editor to support a new package-level Congress attribute within the Congressional Documents and Congressional Reports collections.
• Expanded the Congressional Hearings collection parsing functionality for new “Event ID” resource files.
• Added document classes for the House Rules and Manual and Senate Rules and Manual to the Serial Set collection, enabling these Serial Set packages to be accessible through the House Rules and Manual and Senate Rules and Manual browse and searches.
• Improved the display of the “document in context” tab for the Congressional Hearings, Documents, Reports, and Prints collections so that if there is only one document (i.e., granule or part, for a given hearings package), then the tab will not display.
• Implemented granule persistence for the Statutes at Large collection so that metadata changes are maintained when packages are reprocessed.
• Implemented numerous document parsing improvements across collections.
• Improved the ability to copy links from the GovInfo Link Service application.
• Updated a link on the Public and Private Laws collection browse page.
• Made an update to provide additional title information for the Code of Federal Regulations citation search functionality.
• Updated the Congress Member navigator for the Bound Congressional Record collection.
• Performed various software and security upgrades on multiple internal and external components, including:
  • Automated testing framework.
  • Search engine.
  • Swagger framework, which is the technology that powers the Link Service and GovInfo API, and incorporated styling enhancements.
  • Publication linking semantic web technologies that support the Related Documents functionality.
  
  

  About Release Notes: -- Changes to GovInfo components are made through code deployments on a quarterly release cycle. Release Notes are published after deployments to highlight some of the key changes, summarize other noteworthy activities, and recap new content, feature articles, and top searches since the previous release. Read previous editions of Release Notes.