Congress.gov Public Forum

>> Good morning and welcome to today's virtual public forum about access to legislative information. My name is Kate Zwaard. I'm the director of digital strategy at the Library of Congress and also the LC Labs team. We're really excited to host today's event, and we're even more excited that Dr. Hayden was able to join us to officially welcome all of you. Thanks, Dr. Hayden. >> Well, thank you. And thank everyone for joining us for this vital public forum on access to legislative information. And many of you know that libraries are often said to be the key to a free and open society, and at the Library of Congress, we take this responsibility very seriously. And one of our major responsibilities is to provide information for members of Congress, their staff members and the people that they serve. And Congress.gov has been a vital part of making sure that information is presented in a timely and very secure way. And so this public forum is giving, we hope, you a chance to participate in making access to legislative information even more effective and efficient. And Congress.gov, we've over the years made a number of improvements and made sure that we had input from our users who are the most important people of course. And so this public forum is to continue that. And so we hope that you will be honest and brutally honest about things that you would like to see -- functionality, different types of things that you would like to see Congress.gov do in the future. Because this is the key for public access to legislative information. So chime in whenever you can. That's the format for today. And we hope that you will contribute even after this forum any ideas or suggestions or comments on Congress.gov, because there will be a forum posted. So thank you so much and thank you for really helping us move forward in making Congress.gov even more effective. >> Thank you so much, Dr. Hayden. At this time, I'm pleased to introduce Bud Barton, the Library's chief information officer. >> Thank you, Kate. I'd also like to welcome all of you to our first Congress.gov virtual public forum. As Dr. Hayden mentioned, Congress.gov is one of the most important services that the Library of Congress provides. And I'd like to take just a couple minutes to provide a little background so we have a common frame of reference for today's engagement. The Constitution requires Congress to keep thorough records of its activities, which means legislative data in some form or fashion is as old as the Congress itself. Through the enactment of two laws, one in 1995 and one in 1996, Congress gave the library the responsibility of providing a central accessible place for their data. That's an important nuance. For the most part, the data being provided through the library is not library data. It's data that belongs to the House of Representatives and the US Senate. And they have final say on how their data is presented. And for nearly three decades now, the Library of Congress has helped coordinate a fairly complex data exchange between the clerk of the House, the secretary of Senate and our legislative branch data partners like the Government Publishing office and the Congressional Budget Office to meet the responsibilities that Congress has set for each of us. We're proud of the previous portals the library developed, Congress.gov and the congressionally focused LAS legislative information system. And our current portal, Congress.gov, which combines the missions of both of those legacy portals to support the business of Congress sand to help inform the public. Two things really power Congress.gov and keep it going. The first is the flow of legislative information coming from our data partners. And the second is user feedback which we hope to receive a lot of today. Here at the library, we're dedicated to an iterative development approach. Almost everything we put online is on a schedule for continuous improvement. For Congress.gov, that means new features and functionality are added every three weeks. That development and those features are driven by extensive and ongoing user experience research and direct feedback from everyday users. We hear regularly from all of our stakeholders including members of Congress, their staffs, power users, students, researchers, members of the public using this site for the first time, and others. As you can imagine, not everything that's asked for can be achieved in a short period of time. But all of the feedback that we receive is reviewed and considered by our program team in conjunction with our stakeholders as part of our agile development process. As you're going to hear from our panelists this morning, that feedback is driving the progress for Congress.gov. We've added a lot of new features. We have many more that we want to roll out soon, and we'll continue to do so on a three-week schedule. As exciting as the improvements are, this forum today though is really all about you and feedback. We want to hear your thoughts on how the site is working and what you'd like to see as we continue to improve. I can't promise that we'll be able to do everything that's asked, but I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedules to help us better understand how the site can be optimized and used in a more effective manner. Now let me hand things back over to Kate and we'll get things started. Kate? >> Thank you so much, Bud. Before we get started, I just have a few housekeeping matters. First, as Dr. Hayden and Bud said, the purpose of today's event is to listen to you. And we have substantial time set aside for both questions and for comments. But we'd like to start the day with a little bit of context setting, recognizing that although there are some participants here today who are intimately familiar with legislative data and Congress.gov, there are some of you who may be only familiar with certain aspects of it or maybe new to it altogether. That's why we're going to take a little bit of time at the beginning to share some Congress.gov updates with you. After that, we'll have a panel with our lovely data partners. Then we'll have a series of lightning talks which will hopefully illuminate even more the full range of work we've been doing to make legislative data more available to you. There will be opportunities to ask questions of our speakers throughout that. And we'll end our time together with what we hope will be a full hour of hearing from you. This is the part of the forum that's specifically for feedback. We'll be much more focused on listening than speaking. Another note that this meeting will be recorded. That includes your questions and comments. So for the first part of the program, we'll be hearing from two of my Library of Congress colleagues with a few updates. First up is Robert Brammer from the law library on recent Congress.gov enhancements. >> Thank you, Kate. Thanks for joining us. My name's Robert Brammer and I am a Congress.gov subject matter expert from the Law Library of Congress. The Law Library provides support for the public related to Congress.gov. Since Congress.gov launched, over a quarter of all questions submitted to our Ask a Librarian service have been related to Congress.gov. The law library has helped thousands of constituents this way. So during this presentation I'm going to provide you with some highlights of enhancements that were made to Congress.gov over the past year that really focused on the public. And the first thing I want to talk about is that Congress.gov is heavily influenced by user feedback. We received a lot of feedback from the public through our feedback forum and through our Ask a Librarian service. So for example, just this month we started adding committee hearing transcripts to the site, and we incorporated style improvements to make it easier to link Congressional Budget Office cost estimates. We used data from the feedback forum, metrics and testing for a user-centric approach to adding these new features. So they're easy to find, easy to use. We receive feedback through surveys and an evaluation of metrics based on user interactions within the site. User testing is also central to the design and development of Congress.gov. Our development life cycle is iterative continuous improvement which includes user feedback and in the formative and summative stages. We regularly conduct user testing on critical parts of the site as well as engaging in user testing on new features capture the voice of users. The user testing includes observations of real users interacting with Congress.gov, formative exercises and prototypes. So let's talk about enhancements. Next slide, please? We recently added a feature to the homepage where you can search for your senators and representatives by typing in your address. And this is in direct response to public feedback for people who want to give feedback on legislation. Next slide. The nomination search form now displays historical committee names in the selection list when previous congresses are selected. And this was quite a bit of work for CRS who had to go through the process of tracking down the history of committees to add this feature. Next slide. We added the bound congressional record from 1983-1994. Next slide. We added district maps to the current House member profile pages. Next slide. We added a new collection, Committee Materials which includes committee prints from the 103rd Congress, 1993-present. Next slide. We translated our overview of legislative process videos into Spanish. And if you're not familiar with our legislative process videos, they provide an overview of the legislative process and they're written by experts in the Congressional Research service. Next slide. For the legislation text quick search form, we added keyword and context to the search results. What that means is the search results for that form will now display two snippets of text from each search result so you can display your search terms and context and decide if they're relevant to you. Next slide. We added photographs to member search alerts, so when you receive an email to be alerted when a member sponsors or cosponsors a legislation, that email's going to include their photo. Next slide. We added a weekly alert option to committee schedule. So you can receive an email each Monday with a committee schedule for the coming week. This enhancement, along with the expanded view of the committee schedule, were in response to feedback from the feedback. Next slide. We added speaker to bill text, so you can download an audio file of a bill and listen to it. And of course, this also improves the accessibility of the site. Next slide. We also added links to the new House court site on House member profile pages that allow the user to see House committee assignments and recent votes for member. Next slide. When you sign up to receive an email alert for new and updated legislation, that email will now include the sponsor of that legislation. Next slide. Another feature that we are excited to add in response to user feedback is deep linking for the XML/HTML instance of a bill. So the way it works is if you want to share a link to a specific section of a bill, now you can. And that's a great improvement because before you could only share a link to the top page of a bill. I also want to mention that we improved the accessibility of the site by making it so that screen readers can navigate search results with one click. Next slide. Also in November, when you're looking at a bill page, the overview box at the top now links to associated committee hearings. Next slide. We added a link to the law library's index of foreign law reports to the Congress.gov homepage. If you're not familiar with these reports, the law library takes a topic or an issue and its foreign law specialists issue reports of how different countries have approached the regulation of that issue. So for example, one popular report discusses the regulation of Bitcoin. Next slide. Committee schedule detail pages now display supporting documentation when it's available. And next slide. So these are just highlights of the enhancements from the past year. But there's a lot more that you can take a look at on the Congress.gov enhancements page. And I want to acknowledge all of the hard work of our developers and data partners that they're doing behind the scenes that allow us to add more content to Congress.gov for Congress and the public. I also want to mention that you can get a notification every time we release a new set of enhancements by describing to the Law Library of Congress blog and the Congress.gov notifications email list. You'll find these links in the footer of Congress.gov. Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Robert. Next we'll hear from Andrew Weber from our software design and development group on upcoming features. >> Thanks, Kate. Thanks, Robert. I'm Andrew Weber, the product owner of Congress.gov. And here to talk about -- Robert did a lot of the great things we've done over the last year. We're going to talk about some of the next work that we're working on. Next slide. Committee hearing transcripts was one of the things that we've been working to incorporate the committee schedule that we've had on our roadmap. And Robert shared some of the great work we've done with the committee schedule, but now we've been working to incorporate the hearing transcripts from Govinfo. Here's a mockup of what the printed committee transcripts would look like on Congress.gov. And ideally too, we want to match these with the committee schedule items. And one thing that would be great for that is if the meeting event ID number gets shared across Capitol Hill from docs.congress.gov to Congress.gov as well as being published as part of the metadata on GPO when they post the transcripts. And while most of what I'm going to focus on today is future work, this we were able to get live before today's event. So we now have the first iteration of the committee transcripts online. They're available for the 115th and 116th Congresses. And we've been planning to add other congresses in the future. The hearing transcripts are included in the committee materials search dropdown. And they're also a part of committee meetings. You can find them using the current congress default search that Robert mentioned, and you can see printed transcripts from the current Congress, the 116th Congress. Next slide. Another historic collection we want to bring into Congress.gov are the statutes at large. And a long-term goal of ours is to integrate the historic statutes at large to the website. And we plan to do this in three phases. So the first phase would be dating from 1973-1994 or the 93rd-103rd Congresses, volumes 87-108. And for these items, we have built detail pages for this time, but not currently the text. So you can see summaries, the actions of the legislation. And we want to make the public and private laws browsable, searchable and then incorporate them into Congress.gov, the object pages like this example. The second phase will be to go and collect from Govinfo the remaining statutes at large that they have on their website and incorporate those. And then Jennifer Gonzalez later on today will talk about phase three of the statutes at large during the lightning talk. Next slide. So Congress.gov has a great help center now, but we know that Congress is complicated, Congress.gov can be complicated. And we have a comprehensive amount of information in our help center. So we want to add search capabilities to the top of our help center. And we're working on indexing the contents so that we can add the search results. And we would also like to include keyword and context for the help center results, like in this example, similar to what Robert mentioned for built text. So we really want to help people get to the help that they need. Next slide. Robert shared our initial uses of keyword and context on the legislation text quick search form. But we're looking at ways to possibly expand using that on Congress.gov. And we think that with the addition of the bound congressional record -- so far we've added the six congresses to that, but we want to go back in time to go back to 1873. But that's really going to have a lot more congressional content on the site. So I think that maybe the congressional record quick search form might be the next great place to add the keyword and context for the results. Next slide. With Congress.gov, we care a lot about making the site accessible to all. We care a lot about accessibility. We've made adjustments to the website to help screen readers that are reading the sites. One of the other things that we've added to several parts of the site is this read speaker. And you can see in this page, listen to this page read speaker. You can click play. You'll be able to hear the content. You can also download the audio to play back later. Currently, this is on bill summary, legislation text and help pages. With this week's release, we added to committee reports like this example. But we plan to continue to add some more pages such as the congressional record daily digest, the new committee prints and the committee transcripts. And as far as feedback generally, Congress.gov development is based off of feedback. Robert mentioned the survey where I'm sure we'll get more great feedback that we can use towards future development. But I also again want to encourage you, if you sign up for the Congress.gov notifications and alerts from the law library's blog [inaudible] to help keep you informed of the latest enhancements to Congress.gov and to learn when some of this future work that I've discussed goes live. Thank you. >> Thanks so much, Andrew. Thank you both, Robert and Andrew for that wonderful overview. We'll now have time for questions. You can submit them right in the Q and A portion of your screen. Keeping in mind that we'll have substantial time at the end for open comments, I'll ask you to keep your questions in this section specific to what Andrew and Robert have just shared. So go ahead and type them in the Q and A field and I'll read them aloud. And I see that we have a few questions that sort of came in while folks were talking. We'll also try to answer some of those asynchronously in the Q and A so that you all can see the answers as well. I have a question here for hearing transcripts. Will there ever be live transcription? Or does Congress.gov rely on Govinfo to pass on the information which in some cases can be months later? >> As of right now, our data source is Govinfo. So we will take the transcripts from Govinfo and pull it into Congress.gov. As far as the future, we try to have videos so you can watch occasionally some of the committees will publish an early version of their transcripts. So if you go to our committee schedule on some of them where they passed along the early version of the transcripts, it'll be there. But it isn't live; it is published so far after the fact. >> Another question. With transcripts of hearings, are they submitted in an automated way? Or does your group actively nudge to receive them? I've noticed some delays with certain committees like the Senate judiciary confirmation hearings. >> So far with this initial release, we are taking everything that's printed from GPO and pulling it to Congress.gov. >> A question about, will we see committee markup transcripts? >> As long as they're in Govinfo, we'll pull them over as part of the collection. But if we don't have them as a data source, we won't add them right now. >> I was just going to say lots of great questions on the new transcripts. We're really excited to get those live before today's event. >> Yeah, I'm excited for the panel that's coming up about with our data partners. I think one of the things that it highlights is this sort of complex ecosystem of where data comes from, the transformations that are necessary and how we make all this possible to be viewed from Congress.gov. Oh, another question came in. Is there directory type information for legislative staff? >> So is that question directory -- whose staff members from various offices? >> That's what it seems like to me. >> That's not currently on Congress.gov. We provide more legislative information and kind of pull it together from the House and the Senate as the summaries from CRS as well as the budget information from CBAO. But staff level information isn't something that's currently on Congress.gov. >> How can we submit corrections if we see mistakes in the transcripts? >> That's a great question. On the top and bottom of almost every page on Congress.gov, there's a feedback link, or Give Feedback. And take a second and submit that. There's a couple open questions for how can we improve Congress.gov. That's where people tend to, if they notice something, they'll submit there and then we'll get it updated. So that's a great way to submit feedback through the feedback form which we use to update Congress.gov. >> There's currently an option for seeing related bills from the same session. Will that ever be expanded to include related bills from different legislative sessions? Specifically, bills that are introduced repeatedly but takes years to pass? >> I think that's a great question. It's something we've done some very initial research on. But so far the specialist who analyzed that and the House and the Senate CRS are just looking at current Congress's. We'll keep doing our investigation on this to see if this is something we might be able to add to Congress.gov in the future. >> Another question. I see members of Congress introduction pages with their homepage links. Do you intend to also add their social media accounts? >> So that's one of the things when we've talked about getting data from our House and Senate data partners, we've talked about possibly including social media channels. That's something that we would like to see. Maybe that's something we could add in the future once we have data sources from the House and the Senate sending us that social media feed. So we want to make sure that everything on Congress.gov is accurate, which is why we like to have good solid data sources with our partners to send us the information to then add to the website. So we're very happy to add the new maps to the pages as well as links to their page so it goes off to the member page where they might also have their social media on their House or Senate webpages. >> Thanks, Andrew. Another question, Congress.gov has published some CRS reports. Will it add additional reports to the website? And will it start publishing reports publicly as HTML and not just PDF which would improve accessibility? >> So those are good questions. As far as changes, I think the library continues to consider changes to Congress.gov in response to use feedback. And we'll consider this along with other feedback we have received today. I think what's on the website now is what we're actually mandated to -- congressional mandates to establish the publicly accessible website or the non-confidential CRS reports. Which the rest of the full inventory was then added over the next year. So the library will continue to make available on Congress.gov all non-confidential written products consistent with the directive and the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018. >> Thanks, Andrew. And a reminder to everybody, if you're not seeing the Q and A in your sidebar, there's like a three-dot menu that you might need to hit. And you can chat with the host or the panelists if you're having technical issues. But please try to find the Q and A panel and ask your questions there. Can you link to CSPAN when it's available? >> So that is not something we've done so far. We would need to make sure that like CSPAN has nice structured links that we could send someone directly to. I assume the person is interested in going from a bill to CSPAN to watch the debate on the bill. So we would need to make sure there was some sort of structured format that we could always go to. Otherwise, it's just going to CSPAN.org and that's probably not the desired result. So we want to try to make sure if we do something like that, we have a great way to go from the contextual information on Congress.gov, which part of the library's job is to aggregate and pull all this information about a bill together. So it's very -- it's all about that same piece of information, that particular piece of legislation. And so if we could do something like that, it's a possibility. But most of what we're trying to do is provide all of the information on Congress.gov that's from the government sources, versus CSPAN which records government hearings but it's also a nonprofit cable-run entity. So we have some questions with that. And we need to make sure if we would that we could have a specific URL per piece of legislation or per item that's on Congress.gov to go to directly. >> That's a great point, Andrew. That one of the things we're really concerned with is authenticity and making sure that, you know, we're providing information from government sources. Let me see, there's lots of questions coming in. Another one, can you talk more about the type of hearing or meeting identification information you would need to automatically incorporate from the House and Senate proceedings? >> So if you're on the committee schedule on Congress.gov, or if you're on docs.house.gov and you're looking at the hearings, they each have in the URL a specific ID. And that's the identifier that when on our schedule -- when a committee broadcasts on YouTube one of the hearings, they put that unique identifier, that meeting ID in the hearing on YouTube. And then that's how we pull the YouTube video in. So we pull in part from the House's website for the meeting identification. We then pull the video in from YouTube because they put it in that meeting ID. And so it's that little code that's how we're able to make some of the connections that we do on Congress.gov. >> I love to hear all the details of this, the things that look simple from the web view, but you know, have really complicated underpinnings. I think it's really neat. >> Yeah. >> I'm trying to get to everybody's questions. If I don't -- if I miss you by accident, I just want to remind you that we will have time at the end. So don't be too disappointed. Let's see. Would you consider adding press releases from member offices that are tied to certain bills? >> That's an interesting option. It's not something we've really had much feedback on doing before. Part of it is I don't know how structured that as a data source would be. Because members publish things kind of off to the side on their own website. And it's not like it's going through GPO where they're publishing all of the press releases and then we can pull in the press releases and then have good metadata associated with it. So it really depends on us having good structured data source for us pulling and aggregating things together on Congress.gov. >> Sometimes the House Rule Committee amends a bill through a committee print. Are those in Congress.gov? >> That's a great question. Committee prints are one of the items that we added earlier this year, and that was one of the reasons that we added them, so you'll now be able to see the committee prints on Congress.gov. We had three main new sources of -- sorry. >> Sorry. No, please. >> We had three main new sources of content that we've been adding to Congress.gov this year. The committee prints was one set of the contents. We have all of the committee prints. We've been adding the bound congressional record, so we're going back in time with the congressional record. And then we just recently added the committee transcripts, the hearing transcripts. So those are pretty big new items as far as content that we've been working to incorporate on the website. And once we add it to the website, we then work to incorporate links from the other collections that mention it. So if the Senate's legislation action mentions a hearing transcript, we'll now take that into our next phase and start linking to those. So once we get the collection into Congress.gov, we then try to incorporate and better create linkages across the collections across the website. >> Will Congress.gov carry info on congressional agencies such as the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights? >> We haven't had a lot of requests to do that. We do focus on Congress. So it's everything Congress-related. So it would depend on if the Workplace Rights published something that might be included on the website. It would be something we would need to talk about, think about and see if it's something that could also be provided in a nice, structured data source that we could incorporate. >> Sorry, I'm scrolling through. What are your -- sorry, yes. What are the current limitations for LOC to access House and Senate data like members' representation allowances, staff directories, lobbying disclosure reporting, et cetera? What about other agencies like the FCC? Are those limitations statutory? >> Could you repeat the question again? >> Yeah. What are the current limitations for LOC to access House and Senate data such as members' representation allowances, staff directories, lobbying disclosure reporting? What about other federal agencies? Are those limits statutory? That's a complex question. Maybe we should just break it down into pieces. >> Yeah. >> So I think in terms of providing access to House and Senate data like members' representational allowances or staff directories or lobbying disclosure reportings, are there limitations on LOC to provide that information? And are they statutory? >> So we have been working with the House and the Senate to modernize the way we get some of the data. But some of the data in that question isn't things that we've ever had on Congress.gov. So it's not things we've discussed much about trying to modernize or how to incorporate. As we think of new areas for possible content, we could then reach out and have conversations with them about the possibility of doing that. Again, when we do add something big and new like that, especially when it's coming directly from the House or Senate, that takes the House and Senate's time and resources as well. And it just is -- it turns it into an even bigger project if we have to get more and more things kind of lined up. >> Andrew, there are a couple questions here related to executive branch information. Do we -- is there any executive branch information on Congress.gov? >> So the executive branch is how it relates to the legislative branch. So we have the executive communications. We have things in the Senate, things that go through the executive branch, determinations and treaties. But it's all with the focus of Congress. This is Congress's system for Congress and Congress's constituents. So it's not as much legislative branch focused. We know we have a lot of legislative branch users of Congress.gov because it's important sometimes for their jobs to be able to find out what's going on with Congress. But as far as Congress.gov, the focus really is the legislative branch. >> And I do know we have our friends from the Government Publishing Office as part of our leader panel who have information from all three branches of government. So there's another place to look for that information if you need it. A question here, is there a hard copy analog for the materials in Congress.gov? >> So for the legislation, the legislation is printed and goes to like the Law Library of Congress. If Robert wants to jump in a little bit on this one. If the congressional record is printed as well, it's there. So there's a lot of the material that's in analog format that is stored in the Law Library and other places. >> Yeah, I mean, I just want to mention that you can contact us through Ask a Librarian if you're looking for print sources. The Law Library's happy to help you there. And yeah, I mean generally speaking, you know, the official record for law is generally print. >> I'm so glad that Robert mentioned Ask a Librarian. I just want to remind everybody on the call that the library does offer reference services. And so I really encourage you to use them if there are some things specific that you're looking for. It's an amazing, amazing service. I've used it myself often. Let's see. Would the library -- I'm sorry, Andrew. Did you have something to say? >> And I was going to add, there's been -- the Ask a Librarian link is on all of the pages of Congress.gov in the floater across the website. So if you have questions about the legislative process or anything on the site, you can submit questions about that. And just really I think about a quarter of all of the submissions to the law library's Ask a Librarian relate to legislation on Congress.gov. So it's heavily used and thousands of people have used it since we've launched Congress.gov. So it's great to see people getting assistance that way. >> That makes me so happy to hear. We have about three minutes left. We're definitely not going to get to answer all these questions. Just a reminder that we will have plenty of time at the end. But I do want to keep us on time, so we do have that time reserved for our conversation later. Where can you access transcripts of congressional hearings from the 1970's? I couldn't find those on Congress.gov. >> So for that, I think you would want to contact us through Ask a Librarian, and we can help you with that. >> Sorry, I had to sneeze. >> Bless you. >> Thank you. Will links to the member or committee websites on Congress.gov be updated to the corresponding links to the archive site when the website is taken down? >> I think we've had one or two examples of a committee where it was live. I'm trying to think -- I think the Benghazi committee, when the committee was no longer an active committee, we switched and had an archived version linked on their profile page. So if you go to that one -- and there might be one other I'm not thinking of off the top of my head. >> Hurricane Katrina. >> Hurricane Katrina is the other one. Thanks, Kimberly. So yes, there are a couple examples of the committee is no longer active, so the site might go down. And then we can update the page on Congress.gov with a link to the archived version of their website. >> I was a little worried that Hurricane Katrina was joining in the call and announcing herself. So I'm glad that was Kimberly. That's a relief. Let's see. House and Senate lobbying and financial disclosure data are on their website and Law Library staff can help the public find this information using Ask a Librarian. Thank you, that's helpful. Would the library consider publishing links to executive branch information relevant to legislation such as presidential statements of administration policy? >> I think that's something we could think about. We would need to also kind of get a sense from some of our data partners that that makes sense for us to do. >> Okay, and last question before we move on, this is a really interesting discussion. Will there be future meetings or focus groups to get user feedback as the products continue to evolve? And I can take that one. I agree, it's a really great discussion and we will have at least one more of these sessions and continue to gather feedback in the regular ways, such as, you know, comments on our blog posts and other mechanisms for input. But I'm also really enjoying this, so thank you for that. Thanks so much, Robert and Andrew, for you know, answering all those questions. You were great. And thank you so much for all of the people who submitted really thoughtful and amazing questions. And as a reminder for those of you who I didn't get to, we'll have a chance to talk later. Now it's my pleasure to introduce my colleague Kimberly Ferguson from the Congressional Research Service who will moderate our panel of data partners. >> Thank you, Kate. Good morning and thank you all for your interest in legislative information. For the next hour, our focus is on legislative information, data modernization. Data modernization is the critical foundation for every project related to legislative information. I want to introduce our data partner colleagues Lisa LaPlant and Matt Landgraf from the Government Publishing Office, Aaron Shapiro from the United States Senate, and Kirsten Gullickson from the United States House of Representatives. Our panelists are representatives of the human network that is responsible for supporting the information technology required across our legislative branch organizations. As data partners, we support the legislatively mandated exchange of information among legislative branch agencies, and we provide the United States Congress with a legislative information retrieval system. Transparency to the public about the legislative process is built into all of our legislative mandates. Please notice the people in the gallery of the black and white photograph as a reminder that transparency to the public about the legislative process is also built into the House and Senate chambers in the US Capitol. These photographs also show the Senate and House clerks that serve as the record keepers for legislative information. Our data modernization panelists support the business processes, information tools and systems and data standards that hundreds of Senate and House clerks rely upon to produce the journals mandated by the Constitution and calendars mandated by Senate and House rules. Committees are also required by Senate and House rules to publish specific documents. Each of the colored boxes of this high-level data flow chart represent multiple information tools and systems. The systems vary greatly in age and complexity. Our data modernization panelists are representative of our organizations working in concert, supporting the day to day behind the scenes legislative information record keeping. All four of our organizations have related systems and processes with cross-organization dependencies. Modernizing the formats, delivery mechanisms and input and output processing of legislative data requires multi-year planning and collaboration. Matt Landgraf from GPO, followed by Lisa LaPlant also from GPO, and then Kirsten Gullickson from the House Clerk's office are each going to provide updates on data modernization efforts in their organizations since this panel was last together for the legislative data transparency conference in October 2019. And then our panelists will take some questions. >> Great. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Kimberly. It's a pleasure to be here today to talk with you about GPO's data modernization initiatives. As Kimberly said, my name is Matt Landgraf and I'm the program manager for GPO's XPub initiative. I'll start off -- my colleague and I, Lisa LaPlant, will be sort of tag-teaming this short presentation from GPO. I'm going to start off by talking about XPub, and then Lisa will take over and talk more about the initiatives related to United States legislative markup, Govinfo and new content. And for each one of these topics, we will cover accomplishments, in-process initiatives and the future roadmap. Next slide, please. So XPub. XPub is the initiative at GPO that was formerly known as GPO's composition system replacement. Next slide, please. Okay, so there's a lot to cover on this slide. I'm not going to read it word for word, but XPub is GPO's XML-based composition ecosystem to replace the legacy MicroComp system and the dreaded Locator text format. MicroComp is currently used to compose the majority of congressional documents and select federal agency publications that are printed and published electronically by GPO. So the successful deployment of XPub will enable GPO to publish legislative and regulatory documents in both print and digital formats from a variety of sources in a high-volume production environment. So some of the accomplishments that we can point to thus far include the composition of the entire 2018 main edition of the United States Code that's nearly 60,000 pages. We were able to do this in about seven months which is about half of the time that it's taken previous versions. We've also put some web-based tools and workflows in place for the Office of the Federal Register in preparation for the upcoming release. Our main in-process initiative is to put bills, resolutions, amendments, public laws and statutes at large into production in the 117th Congress. So this will include composition directly from XML for these publications and integrate with authoring and editing tools in the House and Senate. We're also working on a prototype for a more modern workflow for reports that includes the possibility of possibly drafting in Microsoft Word, conversion to USLM and composition in PDF. And there's also been the opportunity to provide more flexibility to explore for more modern formatting options for reports as our director Hugh Halpern has been talking about for the last few months. As far as a roadmap goes, we have a lot of opportunities starting next year after our initial release. House and Senate calendars are on the roadmap, as well as the USLM initiatives for both the US Code and remaining bill versions. And of course, our ultimate goal is to complete the transition of our operations to a digital all-XML workflow that includes digital proofreading, correcting and editing as well as enhanced functionality for structural and semantic markup, and pre-press automation. So it's that whole sort of ecosystem that happens in the GPO publishing process. So with that, I will go ahead and turn it over to Lisa LaPlant who's going to talk about some data modernization innovations. >> Thank you, Matt. Next slide, please. My name is Lisa LaPlant and I'm the program manager for GPO's Govinfo system. In addition to XPub which is GPO's flagship data modernization toolset, there are three additional components that round out our data modernization efforts. Data standards, delivery platforms and the content or data. The acronym USLM stands for United States Legislative Markup. USLM is the modern XML schema that's being embraced by legislative data organizations. An XML schema can be thought of as the data structure that semantically describes information. Using a data standard like USLM allows information to be easily shared and repurposed. Next slide. As part of a series of legislative branch projects, GPO worked with our data partners to transform legacy files into USLM XML that's now available on Govinfo. This is for enrolled bills and public and private laws back to the 113th Congress, and the statutes at large back to the 108th Congress. We're now proceeding down our joint roadmap by converting the statute compilations into USLM XML. Now this is a crucial dataset with touchpoints to other legislative branch initiatives, including the House's Comparative Print project. And this is one example of the need for close communication and collaboration as we work to modernize the legislative data ecosystem. The next item on our roadmap is modeling data and creating transforms for the remaining bill versions. This will be followed by additional legislative publications such as committee reports, hearings and the congressional record, all through XPub. Next slide. GPO's Govinfo system is an ISO-16-363 trustworthy digital repository. It ensures the free flow of federal government information today and into the future. Next slide. Through Govinfo and GPO's other delivery platforms, we make information available in machine readable formats, we provide bulk data and API access, and we value our interactions with the user community through channels like GitHub. So be sure to check out our cataloging records, GitHub repository for access to mark XML metadata, and visit our API GitHub repository to request new features and functionality. And earlier today, there was a question about social media, and GPO's GitHub repository provides examples of how to receive this information through our API for the congressional directory. So in the near term for Govinfo, we're finishing out a major technology refresh project and shifting our focus to prepare for new file formats from XPub for the 117th Congress. We're focusing on bills, public and private laws and the statutes at large. And most notably, we're deprecating the legacy HTML format that has hard returns, and we're replacing it with responsive HTML. We're really excited about this and I know many of you will be too. Next slide. So, toolsets, data standards, and delivery platforms are great, but content or data is the real star of the show. Next slide. Through Govinfo, GPO provides free public access to current and historical federal government information from all three branches, and this includes court opinions from 135 federal courts. Some of our notable historic content includes the Bound Congressional Record back to 1873, the Statutes at Large back to 1951, the Federal Register back to 1936, and the public papers of the presidents back to 1929, all with XML metadata and fully searchable. Today, I'm pleased to announce in partnership with the Library of Congress, the House, and the Senate, we plan to make an additional 10 years of bills status XML files available on Govinfo in early FY '21. We're also working with the Library of Congress on a project to provide access to the digitized statutes at large back to 1817, and in FY '21, GPO is moving forward with a project to digitize the remaining statutes at large volumes back to 1789. As part of the project, GPO plans to prototype the conversion of a subset of digitized statutes at large into USLM XML in order to assess technical feasibility and determine future budgetary requirements. Next slide. Toolsets, data standards, delivery platforms, and content. GPO and our legislative data partners are working together to modernize the legislative data ecosystem. Thank you. >> Kirsten will be our next speaker, Kirsten Gullickson, from the House of Representatives Clerk's Office. Thank you. >> Great, thank you. Thank you, Kimberly, and thank you for the Library to -- for the invitation to speak on the panel today. My name is Kirsten Gullickson, and I'm here representing the Office of the Clerk in the over 200 people on our staff. As many of you know, the Clerk is an officer of the US House, whose primary duty is to act as the chief recorder -- record keeper, the chief record keeper for the House. Under the Clerk, we have nine divisions, and you can read more about our roles and responsibilities on our website, which is simply clerk.house.gov. Again, I'm here representing a little over 200 people who helped the Clerk record the official proceedings and actions of the House. It is one of our systems, a system that we call the Legislative Information System or LIMS, Legislative Information Management System, that feeds data to congress.gov. So, staff in the Clerk's Office have been working with the Library since the inception of this service back when we called it LIS and the Thomas Systems. Next slide, please. As you already heard, we've exchanged data between all of us, between GPO, the Library, the Senate, and the House, and I would just like to highlight two ways that we not only exchange data, but we've used data. And so, one of the beauties is that we are still exchanging information from the Legislative Information System to the Library to the congress.gov system using legacy data formats, and we actually are working very hard to modernize those over the next year or two and use modern APIs instead of our legacy formats. But we also are receiving data from congress.gov, because it's modern and been modernized -- is -- that we are able to receive that data and our data back to us, and we are reusing that in our Clerk's website. We recently removed the beta label from our newly redesigned site, clerk.house.gov and live.house.gov, and we are really excited to be able to reuse our data by consuming an internal API that is maintained by the congress.gov team. So, you can see all the data, the official title sponsor, the introduction date, the latest action. That's data that we, our staff originally entered into our LIM system and went to congress.gov for us all to view on their great UIs, and then we're returning it back, and when you watch proceedings, you can see the connection and the history of that bill if you're watching it live on a date that we're in session or on a previous day. So, we like this idea that we can consume our own data and that we are starting to do that with the data exchange. The second example, if we can go to the next slide, thank you, the second example is the use of a standard identifier, not only for members of Congress, but for the committees, and we have been working in the background to agree upon these identifiers and make sure that our systems can accommodate them. And again, many of us are modernizing our systems. So, it takes us sometimes several years to do this, but one of the IDs that we are really happy about in that has been in existence since the mid-90s, is an ID that we call the bio guide ID. And you can just see, this a snippet of a few places that that bio guide ID is flowing through our websites at congress.gov, at clerk.house.gov, and at GPO, and we're excited that we can reuse that. I'm looking forward to my colleague, Erin's, lightning talk about the bio guide website. It's one of our earliest and websites where we use the power of XML and machine-readable data and we finally have had the opportunity to modernize it and even more importantly is modernize the back end content management system that our staff uses to maintain the biographies and the information about each member. Next slide, please. I did want to mention and reiterate one of the foundational pieces of work that we all do together, and that is data standardization, as Kimberly and Lisa have mentioned. I work on one of the standards, one of our shared XML standards. We have two schemas that we use, a generation one XML standard that we call [inaudible] and then, as Lisa mentioned, a newer standard called United States Legislative Markup. USLM contains other standards like the HTML markup and LegalDocML, which is also known as [inaudible]. The [inaudible] standard is being used by a number of parliaments across the world to put their legislative documents together, and we, here in the United States, had input into that standard by having a member of the Library of Congress's team be on that standards setting organization. And so, we were glad to have an input in that and be able to reuse it back in that. I also want to talk about the power of USLM. We -- that modern schema is going to allow us to do a number of things, including what you heard Matt say about XHUB and being able to publish it natively from the XML, but we also are going to be able to serve up powerful applications like a comparative print program. So, we're working in the Clerk's Office to create an application that will allow us to compare legislation, so one legislative document with another legislative document and also compare the amendments contained in that legislative proposal with the current law, the current law being both the US code as well as a set of acts called statute compilations. And what you can -- more -- if you're more -- if you're interested in a [inaudible] excuse me, if you're interested in that work, we do have a report that has been recently made available, and I'll put that in the chat. We did an extensive report about that work, and so that's detailed in that report, and if you're interested in learning more about [inaudible], which is the international standard that we're moving our legislative documents in, using our USLM schema, they have a summer school class that is actually going on right this week. It's being held remotely. That's put on by the chairs of the standards setting organization that set a [inaudible] together [inaudible] I'll put that link in the chat as well, but thank you all for letting us present a little bit about our data exchange today, and I look forward to the questions and answers. Thank you. >> Thank you very much, Kirsten and Lisa and Max. I'd like to start now with I want to bring Aaron Shapiro from the Senate into our conversation with our first panelist question. Aaron, will you please talk for us what kind of changes were required by the Senate to support the combined congressional calendar on congress.gov, and then, Kirsten, I'll you that same question. >> Thank you, Kimberly. My name is Aaron Shapiro. I'm with the Secretary of the Senate's office. So, for the combined committee calendar that was requested to be put on congress.gov, it was a major change we have to do in a short period of time. We had a very centralized authority for this kind of information, which is our Daily Digest office, which collects the information from the committees regarding their hearings, and then they had a system that they use to, you know, enter this and then transfer it to a GPO for publishing and the congressional record every day. Fortunately, we had already used part of that system to produce information we have on [inaudible] .gov regarding to the hearings calendar, but there was a lot of additional pieces of information being requested that we had to add. So, what we did was we looked to see what was additionally available for what we were already capturing, and then we also tried to build in the application the opportunity to put in more information, when that becomes easier to access and in a more standardized format. So, we did all that was possible in the amount of time provided, but also increased the infrastructure to allow for the additional pieces to flow when that's more possible. Another big change that was required along these lines was to start offering the data in a more temporal model, so to show what each was -- what all hearings were for an individual day as it was scheduled that day and into the future, which was updated on a consistent basis. But we also had to find ways to make this information more meaningful historically. So, part of that was adding a separate data feed also by individual days that would denote when individual hearings were either cancelled or postponed, so that they could be properly removed from the combined committee calendar. Of course, we had to find a way to do this that would be able to be integrated by the congress.gov team in conjunction with the House's information. So, I think we were able to really advance some of our data transfer methods and also the model that we use in this. I think it's been working pretty well, and we're trying to take our lessons learned and apply this to additional data modernization efforts, you know, starting specifically with some of the more Senate focused information sets, such as nominations and treaties, which are a little less complex than these larger sets such as legislation, and then build up this consistent model to use for all of these types of information. So, you know, we were able to tap into a centralized system that we had, which is advantageous to us. I mean, of course, there's always limitations on which way you go, but for this, we're able to, you know, still maintain the authoritative records on this and have a close -- and have it be aligned with the print publications. So, I think what they -- the way that they solved this was a little different in the House. So, I'll pass it on to Chris [inaudible] Angela [inaudible]. >> Thank you. Yeah, we -- thank you, Aaron, and thanks for mentioning I'm going to jump ahead, but thank you for mentioning the temporalness and the temporal challenges that we have. We often -- our legacy systems really are talking about what happened today, and our publications are really about a point in time, and so those systems were really designed just to output that paper, because the legislative process is a paper driven process. And so, none of our legacy systems had that temporalness, even in the House, and many of our systems don't have that temporalness built in. And certainly, how we have maintained the law or [inaudible] is definitely has no temporalness. It really takes you to do the legal research to decide what was the law in a particular time, and so that is -- that temp -- I'm glad you mentioned that, because that is a challenge that we have in so many aspects of modernizing our systems. For the Shared Committee Calendar, we already had within the House rules a mandate for the committees to be posting documents that would be used during committee meetings, including their meeting notifications. And so, our work to do the Shared Committee Calendar was really twofold, one, to work with our team in the Clerk's Office and with the congress.gov team to make sure that we had a modern API data exchange for them to read the data and get the links to the to the documents that are on the committee repository on Docs.house.gov, and in addition, then we had a real education effort. We did have an event ID or a unique identifier for the hearings and markups embedded and available on our committee repository page, but then we needed to do some education to the committees and have them manually input that event ID in their video, so that when congress.gov's team consumed both the video as well as our docs.house.gov committee repository feed, they could match them together and present what you see now. So, and we -- we're doing very well. We do have some of the same challenges that the Senate does about what happens when a meeting is deleted from the system, which is rare. We don't allow, once this meeting is posted on docs.house.gov, we don't let the users, the committee users delete those. They have to come back to our office. So, we still have some manual processes that we have to do and communicate to the congress.gov that we [inaudible] delete with that data exchange. So, we still have some work to do, but I think we had a little easier [inaudible] than Aaron's team did, because we had that repository there. >> Thank you both, and I just want to stitch something together. Kirsten talked about the House event ID, and we had a question earlier about how do we create those relationships, and I just want to one, applaud both Kirsten and Aaron. They are responsible for creating the house event ID in the House and the Senate [inaudible] ID in the Senate, and those are really the fundamental, very, very important, unique identifiers that are the building blocks that kind of paved the way for us making connections between a meeting announcement and a meeting video, and we are on the brink of also combining those meeting transcripts within the same record. And so, it's those little things that probably normal people don't think about day to day, but they're very, very important fundamental building blocks to the necessary structure of things. I also just want to shout out, Lisa, Lisa mentioned something that's super, super exciting, and I bet if we were all in an auditorium, she maybe would have gotten a standing ovation for this, but taking those hard returns out, the work that GPO is doing to remove those hard returns from the HTML views, that's a really, really exciting thing. And so, bravo and congratulations and thank you. Having the opportunity to work with Lisa and Matt and Kirsten and Aaron is absolutely fantastic. These are really, really super terrific public servants. So, thank you all. We have received some questions about data standards. Lisa talks about USLM, and Kirsten talked about USLM, and I'll just take one of the questions from the Q&A. Is USLM being used by federal agencies and state governments? I imagine Lisa or probably Lisa, this one is for you. >> Thank you, Kimberly. So, that's a really great question. One of the items that we did in conjunction with our projects for enrolled bills, public, and private laws, and the statutes at large was to run a parallel project with the Office of the Federal Register. Now, it was a pilot project to look at the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations to see if we could begin using USLM to model data for regulatory information. So, that pilot project concluded. I want to say it was last year, and I would encourage you to go to GPO's USLM GitHub repository. There's sample data there available for Federal Register documents and the CFR, and please take a look at it. Take a look at how USLM was used to model regulatory data, and please provide feedback to us through our GitHub repository by submitting an issue. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. We have another -- someone has picked up on the temporal theme that both Aaron and Kirsten have mentioned, and this question is, will USLM search across time, or will we have to filter which Congress first? >> USLM is only the data format, and so a particular document will be in that USLM format, and the metadata will tell us the time. It would be the system that's using the USLM documents that then would have to accommodate the temporalness, and we certainly, in our comparative print project, one of the things that we are exploring is can our back end database that's going to house the US code and the statute compilations, which is the current law data set. Can we store the different versions of the documents in USLM, so that we can serve up a user experience that lets you experience the temporalness. So, for instance, if you want to take a bill that was introduced on January 15th and compare it to the current law as it was on January 15th, you could do that, and we could serve up a comparative credit report to show you how it was on January 15th. If you then wanted to do it today, on September 10th and had the law change from January 15th to September 10th, you could then say, did the law change, give me a report as the law is today, and so we would -- the system would set up that temporalness, not necessarily the USLM. The USLM would just have the metadata to tell you the versions and control that the timelines and the dates in there, and that certainly is something that's modern to us as some of our other documents haven't been that readable -- machine-readable before. You really had to know how to manipulate that data, and some things were just not -- you couldn't provide these types of services before. >> Lisa, is that a complete answer? >> That's complete. >> Thank you. >> So yeah, we do have a Q&A question here. I think Lisa mentioned, add in both data for bills status XML going back 10 years, which is 108th to 112th Congress, yes, you did hear that right. So, all of the data partners have been working on that, particularly our GPO colleagues. So yes, you did hear that right. Okay. Now, we have about one minute left in the session. Is there any final thoughts you'd like to add? >> Thanks, I have something, and I see some of these questions are coming up about committee videos for the Senate. I just wanted to let people know that we've been working extensively with the Library of Congress as well as National Archives to try and figure out new ways of archiving and providing access not only to committee hearings, but also to floor proceedings. Hopefully, there's a way that [inaudible] efforts can be combined into a more unified system that will allow the kind of access I think that people are seeking to be achieved. Obviously, this involves a lot of organizations and a lot of planning and takes a lot of time, but I did want to make everyone aware that this is something that we are currently acting on, and I'm hopeful to have a solution that more fully meets some of the ideals set forth by some of the attendees today. So, I don't have any estimate as to when that will be possible, but it is all in the works. I just wanted to give everybody that update. >> Thank you so much, Aaron. So, we have about [inaudible] some time now for a Q&A for the panel. I'd like to remind everybody that at the end we'll have some time for open comments, where we'll get to hear your voices, which will be exciting. So, if you could confine your questions to the topics of the talks, that would be really helpful at this time. >> I'm not sure if I completely answered or if Aaron's answered completely the video question here, I do know that, you know, as Jim said, in the answer in the chat that if the committee videos are available on YouTube and it's linked to a meeting, it's being consumed. I think the House committees have a significant challenge putting up back video, because our own internal house rules and committee rules and just practice around those early days of committee videos was very different across the committees, and the chairman of each committee had a lot of autonomy on how to operate and how to publish that video, because it wasn't really seen as official as it is now. So, I think it would take us a fair amount of effort to expose some of those early committee videos, certainly, a project that's worth discussing and talking to see if that could happen. >> Thank you so much, Kirsten. I think that's really helpful clarification. I just like to note that, you know, it's really lovely to see Matt and Lisa here. We were colleagues at the Government Publishing Office back when it was the Government Printing Office many years ago, and it's so thrilling for me to see how much progress they've made in the years that I have not been with them, which I hope are not connected. I think they're sort of unrelated, because I hope that I wasn't the stopper of progress, but they're really doing some amazing work. I have a question here about whether this session will be available for viewing after this. We intend to share the contents of the presentations and also wrap up what we learned today in sort of a blog post or maybe even a series of blog posts, depending on how much there is. So, we will be sharing the contents of this meeting publicly, you know, for those of you who are here and would like to reflect on it, but also for people who weren't able to make it. And I'd like to remind everyone that there is a survey on congress.gov. So, if you have friends or colleagues who weren't able to make it today, they can submit their input through that, or if you have additional thoughts, as we, you know, sort of conclude our time together that you wish you had added, now is not the only opportunity. You can do so later. Here is a question. So, Kirsten, it looks like a number of committees aren't properly tagged in their videos to be picked up by congress.gov. Is there something that can be done to validate this data? >> Yeah, so we would love to be able to build some tools that help them automate that entry. Right now, it's manual, and we address it both in our training sessions at the Clerk's Office provide to the committees to add that in as well, the Library of Congress addresses that and often reaches out to the committees and says, hey, can you go tag your video, so we can do that link up. We are exploring ways to make that more automated for the committee staff. Again, right now, it's a manual process. So, it really is at that training level, the human has to do it. >> Thank you. I think one of the things that, you know, I hear from Kirsten and the other members of the panel here is, you know, the legislative branch is not necessarily a hierarchy in the way that the executive branch is. And so, it takes a lot of effort and coordination to tie all these various data streams together, and I just want to acknowledge, you know, in the maybe 10 or 15 years that I've been in this space that a lot of what has been accomplished is from the hard work and also partnership of folks, you know, I think, you know, you guys have been all working together to make this possible over many, many years, and it's been sort of hard one round, because every little piece needs to be sort of figured out each time we want to integrate a new data source, and I think it's pretty amazing. It's a pretty amazing testament to partnerships across the legislative branch. >> Thanks [inaudible]. >> Thank you, [inaudible]. >> Yeah, do you have anything to share about that? >> Well, I think, right, you're absolutely right. This is all about shared partnership and being able to work together and have a vision that, you know, first division is the legislative branch needs to make sure these services are provided to members of Congress and their staff and to the public. And we look at that higher vision that we have as ledge branch organizations and ledge branch support staff, and then I think we all individually then go back to our organizations and decide well, how do we best accomplish this, is this best accomplished in the Clerk's Office and at the Secretary's Office, or is this best accomplished by congress.gov or at GPO, in that our, you know, our working strategy is that, and so to be able to work with a team of people who see that bigger vision has been really quite good, and we -- and it's made us successful, and then in the end, the challenges as you know, Kate, the challenges we have is that data starts somewhere in these systems. The data starts with Secretary of the Senate staff and Clerk of the House staff who manually are recording what's happening. I mean, there's -- we don't have any natural language processors or anything that is reading the video or any of those types of things to get the data in the system. So, someone has to start by keying it in, and we are -- the -- the House and the Senate have some great staff who take those jobs seriously, and that then results in great content that you see at govinfo and at congress.gov and on our [inaudible] and then on the Secretary's website a nd then the Clerk's website as well, that starts with humans [inaudible] trained them in, and hopefully, you know, we're designing systems that they like to use and they like to enter them in and that we're using modern human design principles to do that as well. So-- >> I really like to echo what Kirsten is saying here. You know, I've had the privilege of working on with the Clerk's on the Senate side, and I don't know about dedicated and professional group of individuals who are so intent and really dedicated most of their, if not all their professional careers, to capturing and accurately disseminating, you know, legislative data timely, and there's no higher goal that they have to make that information available and completely accurate, and it's a huge task that they do every day, especially with all the other things that happen. So, it's a great honor, you know, to be able to work with such, you know, diligent data partners across and be able to help, you know, share this very hard work that these, you know, professionals put in to capturing this data and making it accessible to as many people as possible, because, I mean, if it's not right at that point of origin, everything else goes wrong. And, I mean, these people make very, very few mistakes, and as Kirsten said, it's really about us, you know, trying to design the systems that, you know, make their job as less complicated as possible and then, you know, making that information flow to where it needs to, without having to change their individual workflows, and, you know, without, you know, their involvement, their cooperation, none of these other things would be possible. >> And I agree with that. So, it's been just an absolute honor to work with our legislative data partners, and the work that we've done over the past couple years and in conjunction with input from our user community, you know, we want to keep doing this work. We want to keep making our systems better and keep these collaborative efforts going, because we really feel like this is for the benefit of the American public and getting this legislative information out there. It truly is an ecosystem of legislative data, the tools, the people, the data sets themselves, the structure, and we need to have that type of collaborative environment to continue to make this information available. >> I'm really inspired by that. I'm really inspired by the human relationships and the, you know, the goal driven work that, I mean, we all share. We all share, you know, a set of values of, you know, publicly available information and access to primary sources, and I think those two things, that and the human relationships have been able to make this work. But, you know, another thing that it makes us work is data standardization, and I think that that has been something that makes all of this possible, and I was wondering if one -- if any of you had, you know, maybe a story to share about data standardization and how that made things -- made new things possible or I don't know, maybe I'm just the only one who loves data standardization. I think it's really cool. >> Yeah, I know it's not [inaudible]. I know Lisa [inaudible] loves it, too, so. >> We love data standardization, and one of the best things that happened was that the modern data standards of XML and JSON and, you know, there's a zillion of them that we could all name that, that the industry finally caught up to what the needs of legislative bodies need, you know, in what the legal document requires. And we've been working really hard, I think, behind the scenes since in 1996, 1998, when that original law that [inaudible] really threw up was created to say, hey, we needed all work together, was that the IT industry caught up and has now really given us the tools to make this ecosystem work and we -- so many of us have been behind the scenes trying to encourage that, and [inaudible] know that folks in the Library and GPO and others across the country and across the world have been sitting on data standards bodies and making it possible, just the LegalDocML, the heavy lift that that took for folks to be on the OASIS panel to do that work and just the amount of time I spent just I didn't even sit on the panel, but just getting the phone calls and saying this is how federal legislation and federal law in the United States is formatted, and this is what we need was a heavy left. And so, people have really done the work to make that data standardization happen, and then the other stuff is, just like you said, human relationships and having breakfast, which we, you know, I deeply miss our breakfasts where we can talk about this, and we have to do Zoom calls and Microsoft Teams calls to talk about some of this, but just saying can we make this work, can you go back to your team and can this unique identifier work, can you do it, and trying to figure out how to put these little things, which are big things, in our strategic plans and move our organizations along at the same time? Yeah. So, we love standardization. It's made our job easier. >> And just -- I'm sorry. So, just one more thought on data standardization. It really lends a sense of predictability to the data. So, whether it's being able to know what sort of bio guide ID will be available in mods metadata or maybe it's knowing what type of response you would get from an API. So, data standards really allow for that sense of predictability, and when there's predictability, that enhances reuse, and it enables systems to be built to be able to consume and interact with this data. >> You know, [inaudible] point's really key. You know, it a blessing or a curse. We've all had the opportunity to work with a lot of data that's been less than ideal and then try and fit that into, you know, more modernized systems. You know, and I think, you know, something, that's been a great advantage to all of us, you know, and then our collaboration is understanding that there's many uses of the data that we may not understand yet, but like by standing, by establishing these structures and building this foundation, you know, it'll allow for additional progress be made that we may not be around for, but, you know, that's what we want to allow for, you know, our predecessors, and, you know, people outside of our individual, you know, institutions to take this data and do things that we can't even imagine with, you know, or tying it all together in ways we can't and just having that foundation where everything aligns in our very unique environments takes a tremendous amount of work. And, you know, without GPO and the Library of Congress, obviously, none of that would be possible. So, I mean, it may not seem like a major accomplishment all the time, when something additional goes on congress.gov, but the amount of individual effort involved by all of our groups is tremendous. So, it's really amazing what the Library's accomplished, and, you know, I'm very proud of what we've all done together. >> Thank you. Kimberly, there's a question for the panel. Sometimes information such as bills or committee reports are available on third party websites before it's on congress.gov. What can we do to address this gap? It's hard, I know, says the author. >> So, certainly, congress.gov pays attention to officially published materials, and GPO tends to be our data source. Lisa touched on what both Matt and Lisa talked about, the security and the standards and the authenticity, which is really, really important, and so official publications, making sure that the -- it is the true publication that Congress intended to have produced is really important for congress.gov. Panelists, would any of you like to chime in to talk about that a little more? >> For me to answer that question, I would need to know more. I would need to see the commercially available source to figure out where they're getting it from and how they might be getting it from. So, before I would know where the time lag is, because as Kimberly said, there is a workflow about how the committees submit their transcripts and their hearing documents and their markup, their committee reports to GPO for printing, and then we -- certainly those would be the ones that we would want exposed and made available on congress.gov. So, sorry, I don't have much of an answer for that. >> So, I think if there's particular bills that people are noticing to submit that through, you know, the contact information on congress.gov, that would be really helpful in terms of tracking that down. We can look at the specific [inaudible]. Does that make sense? >> Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. >> Great. Let's see. This one's fun. Particular to Kate as moderator, how can we harness the Library's crowdsourcing effort to improve how legislative info is made available to the public? This question might be better suited toward later, when we have a little bit more time for interaction. I'm definitely excited about -- for those of you who don't know, the Library of Congress launched a crowdsourcing program about a year ago. It's called By The people, and you can view it from crowd.loc.gov, and through it, we invite the public to help us transcribe handwritten items in our historic collection and check the work of others. And it's primarily an engagement mechanism, and we do get these really helpful transcripts at the end, which will allow us to make that content available to people who use screen readers and also through search and discovery. But the really fun thing is, is that we get people who are just curious, who don't come to the Library looking for a particular thing, who want to just, you know, be enlightened and learn stuff, reading primary source material. And I think it inspires me to think about ways that we could use the same technology to get people to engage in primary source legislative data as well. Of course, there's always issues of authoritativeness that we need to consider, so, but I think it would be something really exciting to discuss. I was wondering if the panel had any thoughts about that, particularly, or particular aspects that might be most amenable to crowdsourcing? We talked about some data standardization, and one of the things that are -- is so expensive in making legislative data available through websites like congress.gov and govinfo, is, you know, those touch points where there isn't standard tagging or standard data formats. And I'm wondering if that's an opportunity there that we could invite people to sort of help, that conceptually, not actively, I think, there's a lot of things to iron out in the meanwhile. >> You know, one thing that I've been interested in, Kate, as it relates to like this committee hearing stuff, so it's not quite exactly what you're talking about. It's exactly like what would be the most useful way for this to be consumed by, you know, end users, you know, obviously, a link to the video is one thing but what about being able to go through the closed captioning for a search to find out specifically, you know, for specific times in the video that you can go to, you know, using sidecar files, and this is same kind of thing that we're looking at in terms of Senate floor proceedings, you know? When an actual introduction on the floor occurs, how do we get people to that video quickly, and is that the most useful, or is it just being access to the video? So, I mean, this kind of additional input is really helpful to us to kind of figure out how to prioritize some of these initiatives. You know, we understand that people want more, and we want to certainly provide that in a way that's, you know, can be authenticated and it's secure, accurate, and timely, but along those lines is which of the pieces, and I know, you know, a lot of people on this have been involved in this previously. But, you know, what specific aspects are, you know, the most sought after? You know, is it, you know, just the transcript, or is the video, or is it the video laid on top of closed captioning, you know, that's searchable? So yeah, there's lots of things that we want to do and some -- and we understand there's lots of things that people want more information on or different formats, but, you know, just sometimes, like, this crowdsourcing could be useful to help us, you know, establish priorities, not that that can always be followed completely, but just to help understand what would be the most useful. So, that's what comes to mind for me at least, Kate. >> One of the things that I've noticed about the [inaudible] data taskforce is how closely they, you know, you all and including the Library of Congress, have been intertwined with our, you know, sort of user community. We have an active user community base, many of whom are on the call today, and I think a lot of the things that we try to do have been driven by user requests or user needs. Do any of you have an example of something like that, that you might want to share with the group? >> So, I can take that one. So, there have been a number that have come through our GitHub repository, whether it be requests for adding different types of information into the bill status XML or request for certain functionality through our govinfo API. You know, we look at the GitHub repository, we look at the issues. If it's an operational issue, we try to address it promptly, and then there's some items on there that are requests for features. So definitely, you know, please let us know if there's items that are higher priority, if there's functionality that you're looking for, especially related to both data and our API. >> Kimberly, another question for the panel. Are all these materials in the public domain? >> That's a really good question. Yes. >> Lisa, would you like to address that one? >> Yes, and, you know, in terms of public domain, it's my understanding that government materials are not subject to copyright. I kind of look to the Library of Congress and in terms of commenting on copyright on government materials, but the materials that we have on govinfo are also part of the Federal Depository Library Program. So, that's information that is made available to the public, and it is produced at public expense, and, you know, in terms of government materials, they're not subject to copyright in the United States. >> If there are any copyright attorneys on the call, please do jump in, but I just want to affirm Lisa's answer that in the copyright law of the United States specifically exempts materials produced by the, sorry, materials produced by the federal government, but there are cases in which we republish copyrighted -- copyright -- copywritten material -- copyrighted material. This is going great. So, if there's an image that's copied -- that is under copyright separately that we published as part of the Congressional Record, for example, that particular item may be separately governed by different copyright rules. >> We also, Kate, there's also in our XML and sometimes we embed a little line in the metadata that says, this is not subject to copyright and put the US code site that says it isn't, just to give folks that extra assurance that it is in the public domain. >> Yeah, and we hope that you use and reuse it, as many of you on the call, actively do. Kimberly, another question for the panel. I was just asked by a member of office a few minutes ago, very timely, about how their bill is not shown as passed, sorry, about how their bill is not shown as passed the House on govtrack and congress.gov, even though their bill was included in another bill that passed the House. Do you have any thoughts about that? >> Yes. So, the official publishing workflow is really important. There is and, you know, we've been talking throughout this panel about publishing bill text in XML, and that is an opportunity to expedite the publishing workflow processes. So, really, it comes down to what, well, we don't know what the -- what that bill is, but GPO does a great job of turning those -- availability of those texts, turning those around in a timely manner, and they take direction from the House Clerk and the Senate Clerk. And so, what we really need to do is look upstream to -- we should take a look at that bill number and follow it upstream to see has it been ordered to be printed. A lot of times, there are some minor delays and difference between being ordered to be printed and to be passed. So, we'll be happy to look at that if you want to send us that bill number, but, generally, we need to look upstream at the workflow to see where that item is in the legislative process. >> Kimberly, if I could add to the question, the answer. We also do try both the congress.gov folks and the Secretary and House Clerk staff also tried to identify bills that might be similar or are related bills. So, there's a related bills tab, and sometimes that's where you have to kind of follow the link to say, is this large [inaudible] if we have a, you know, 100-page bill and there's two related bills, maybe there is a two-page bill that got attached to it. And then, I think, to reliably kind of connect that data that says this little bill got consumed in a bigger bill and that bigger bill passed is then we do need to know what is the metric for saying that it's the same as we certainly know the citations will change, the references will change, because the section number's often -- it gets put in a title, it'll go from title five to section one to title five, section five -- 500, and so those numbers will get changed. So, we have to decide, is there a percentage, if we could automate that type of service, what's the percentage of the bill changed as it went through the legislative process? So, oftentimes we aren't at a point yet to make that kind of judgment [inaudible] introduced bill get consumed in a larger bill and then passed within the system. But it's certainly something, you know, as we talk about things you can look up on congress. gov and what you can see, I mean, when we're talking about these kind of complicated legislative procedures, we've done a good job delivering the base of services. >> Thank you, Kimberly. Another question for the panel. What about those things circulated during discussions between elected officials? They're not official, but we see them in the press, and they're part of the legislative record. >> That's an excellent question. Yeah, so just like any other document, there are often drafts of documents that different groups work on and collaborate on to come up with their final publication. And so, you know, that's a good indicator that people are circulating drafts and having conversations about drafts and, you know, working together to make proposals that will eventually possibly end up as officially authenticated published bill text. >> I think we have time for one more question. Is there a way to reasonably include floor scheduling information alongside committee proceedings info in the congress.gov calendar? >> That's another really good question. Kirsten and Aaron have been -- both been great resources in working with the Library. On the homepage, we do feature the available floor scheduling information that is available from official data sources, and we incorporate that to the extent that it is available. Possibly, Aaron or Kirsten have additional information about floor scheduling information available from the House and Senate. >> Thank you, Kimberly. Yeah, you know, that is a particularly challenging thing, particularly in the Senate. I mean, obviously, there are many calendars. You can look at the Senate Calendar of Business to see. One thing I did want to highlight and compliment, you know, the extensive work that the Library has done on this is providing information about what occurred in the Senate in the past that's called Today in the Senate, and that has a great breakdown of all the legislative activity broken into the individual section. So, there is that kind of snapshot of what did happen on a legislative day that occurs afterwards. Unfortunately, none of us have crystal balls and can predict what actions will occur in the future in the Senate, even for a given day. So, we certainly provide the information we have. It's just not very extensive based on the nature of the Senate, you know, I think things may be a little different in the House, but I'll let your Senate address that. >> Yeah, we -- thank you, thank you, Aaron. It's a good question. The schedule is put out by the leader, the, you know, House leadership, and it certainly is -- there are communication channels for that, but we have not really taken a look at how to get that communication channel to come back and publish that on the Clerk's website or even -- and then pushing that to congress.gov. It's a good question and good idea, and so we can take that and study to see if we can do that. And, like Aaron said, they may think that something's going to happen on the House floor, but then in the middle of the day, things change. So, what's the level of accuracy that we can provide? We would not want to explore that, too. So, since some of those legislative days are pretty -- some are very predictable, and others are unpredictable. It's a good question. >> [Inaudible] along those lines, I think all of us take great effort not to predict what's going to happen. We certainly are much more comfortable on reporting what has happened, which is the main focus of our efforts. >> Exactly, and that's definitely, you know, that's how we like it, too, record what happened and report out what happened and what might happen, sometimes, we don't even know, not until we get into the chamber and start doing our job. >> Thank you, and as a wrap up for that, I want to point out the resource that Aaron was talking about, I think it's a little bit funny. On the homepage of congress.gov, in the column that has the header recent, that very top link, it's called Yesterday in Congress, and it is called Yesterday in Congress, because we have a really engaged user community and [inaudible], for many years, the link to the resource that Aaron just referenced, what's called Yesterday in Congress, and if you click on that link, you see a list of action on legislation browsed by date, and it does break things down day by day. We tried to call that resource by the name action [inaudible] browsed by date, and our users revolted. They absolutely -- our user said you have to call that link Yesterday in Congress, and that's just so -- just a reflection of we really do listen to our users, and we do what we can to make our users comfortable and happy, but we absolutely do have to work within the official materials that are available from our partners. So, thank you panelists very much and thank you everyone for your questions. Thank you so much. >> Thanks for moderating that, Kimberly, and hosting and thanks for all of our data partners for that overview. It's, you know, clear to me that a lot of thought and communication between all of you make all this possible, and it's really exciting to hear from you directly. At this point, we want to shift gears into a short series of lightning talks about a few of the features available from congress.gov. Again, we know that many of you have made good use of these resources for a long time, but for newer congress.gov users, we hope that this is informative. We'll be good with Erin Hromada from the Office of the House Historian to talk about bio guides. >> Good afternoon, everyone. You can go to the next slide. I'm going to try to be lightning fast, but, you know, the Biographical Directory is not a necessarily a lightening topic. It's vast and has a really long history, and as a historian, I love talking about it. The next slide, please. So, bio guide is still the same as it always was, still in the stories and the lives of the members. There's more than 12,000 entries, same text format since 1859, covering in BIOS bibliographies research collections of images, but bio guide has been going through a slight transformation of its own. Next slide. And next month, we hope it's -- the new webpage will be coming out. This will be the public side of it. So, instead of the old traditional, when you land on bio guide, you get the little search forum, you'll get a page that looks like this, where you either can start searching in the box with text or click the arrow, and you'll go into a more, a deeper search form. If you can open up the next slide, please. So, our new web search will look a little bit like this. It's not quite Amazon, you know, but it is a new search where we can type in first name, last name, text. Next slide. And it will have some filters for it on the side where you can start to see where you filter down and you can click on the 113th Congress, and you would see 664 hits, excuse me, 64 hits under John Adams there, and you'd start working your way down. Next slide, please. So, the new profile page will look like this, where you'll have an image. If we have one, then you'll have the text, and the part that we think our users are going to enjoy the most is really what's on the left-hand side there, where it's data, and we start to break out a little more of the nuts and bolts of a member service. And next slide, please. And if you scroll down and you open it up, you start to see starting dates, election dates, swearing in dates, departure dates, for John Quincy Adams there, you'll see departure on February 23rd 1848, because he dies during the middle of the Congress. So, we'll have departure early information, and we'll break these things down a little bit deeper, and that's kind of what our users are asking for. Next slide, please. So, really, what is next for bio guide, this is a snapshot of JQA's entry in the -- in what is the new content management system that my staff has been working on as well, as the Senate Historical Office. This is one of the places where we actually share the same database, which is pretty amazing, and sometimes we share John Quincy Adams, but he died in the House, so we like to claim him as ours. But we will be adding in a lot more information on each Congress district information, but all of this takes time, and this is all done manually. So, full birth dates and death dates will be in additional nicknames, valid names. Members like to change their names, so we'll be changing that up and slowly releasing more and more data, and all of that's downloadable. And that's -- next slide -- and I think that's it. I appreciate the chance to give you a two-minute overview of the Biographical Directory. Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Erin. Next, we'll hear from [inaudible] Dennis of CRS. >> Hello, thank you. I will be speaking about the Library's project to modernize the Constitution Annotated this morning. For those of you who are not familiar with the Constitution Annotated, this Senate document has been Congress's official record of the Constitution for over 100 years. It explains to Congress and the public every provision of the Constitution and how the Supreme Court's interpretations of those provisions have evolved. In today's era where so much information is available online, Congress and the general public need a reliable source of information about the Constitution. To ensure that the Constitution Annotated is free from political bias, Congress mandated the Librarian of Congress to prepare it. The Librarian, in turn, delegated this task to the Congressional Research Service. As such, the Constitution Annotated conforms to the CRS standard of objective, authoritative, and nonpartisan analysis that informs all of CRS's advice to Congress. Continually updated, the Constitution Annotated provides a timely, comprehensive, and balanced analysis of the Constitution to assist Congress and the public in understanding America's legal foundation. The Constitution Annotated Modernization Project is intended to bring this volume, first conceived in the 19th century, into the 21st century. The project consists of two parts: first, the creation of a new website to make the Constitution Annotated more accessible, and second, a comprehensive revision of the volumes' organization and text to make the methodologies employed by Supreme Court justices in interpreting the Constitution more transparent. With respect to the first objective, the library launched the initial version of the website last Constitution Day, September 17, 2019. During the past year, the library has been honing the website and adding new features, such as a homepage carousel that highlights key issues and updates page to announce recent changes to the content, improve search functionality, and streamline browse navigation. Since its launch less than a year ago, constitution.congress.gov has had over a million visits, educating people across the nation and around the world on the Constitution. Next slide. The second aspect of the modernization project, the first comprehensive revision of the Constitution Annotated's organization in [inaudible] since 1952 is also underway. In crafting the new version, CRS has been making the Constitution Annotated work accessible to persons who have not been trained in the law. Consequently, we have been expanding the Constitution Annotated statement of the historical context surrounding the Supreme Court precedence and making more transparent the various approaches that Supreme Court justices have employed when ruling on constitutional questions. As these new sections are developed, they are incorporated into the website. We hope that you would take the opportunity to explore constitution.congress.gov and share it with your friends. And thank you for your time this morning and Jennifer Gonzalez who now speak on the Law Library Statutes at Large project. >> Thank you so much, and good morning. So, I am Jennifer Gonzalez, a legal information specialist with the digital resources division of the Law Library of Congress. Andrew mentioned earlier about the addition of the first two phases of adding Statutes at Large to congress.gov. I will give a few more details on that plus preview what he called phase three. The Statutes at Large is a chronological collection of laws passed by Congress plus other items included as necessary. This circle collection is ripe for addition into congress.gov. Next slide please. All three phases are currently in process. Andrew mentioned phases one and two and phase three has those historical texts all the way back to 1789. The goal is to give this historical content a more modern backend through the addition of metadata. The sponsored data project involves looking at the history of bills or the congressional record, the daily digest, to find the sponsored data and input into spreadsheets. The action code data project looks at the history of bills and inputs that data into a spreadsheet as well. Bills can number into the tens of thousands per Congress. Finally, phase three includes the Statutes at Large from 1789 through 1950. These are currently available on the law.gov website and the century of lawmaking websites. Next slide. And the law website, the text is available by Congress or by individual statute. This will remain on the website now and in the interim until these are available on congress.gov. Our goal is to add the metadata necessary that will enable inclusion of the text into the current congress.gov structure with all of the data as available. So the big question is who does this work? I have a team of interns each semester. They're generally long library graduate students who find the data and fill in the spreadsheets. Over the summer, we had 51 interns and we've had approximately 5,000 hours during this year. Currently, this week, in fact, I began 25 interns that are exclusively working on the Statutes at Large on the Statutes at Large phases and this program. And now to James Sweeney for another historical collection. >> Hi. I'm James Sweeney of the law library's digital resources division. And we'll update you on the digitization of the US congressional Serial Set. Next slide, please. Providing the public with easy access online to the complete United States congressional serial set because of its legislative and historical significance is a high priority for the law library. The serial set is an official bound collection of reports and documents of the House and Senate, the US Congress. Its contents include detailed information on a wide variety of subjects as varied as studies of wage and prices, immigration, women and child labor, unemployment, national security, conduct of war, and civil rights. Key historical initiatives are also documented, which provide riveting contemporary accounts of many efforts that change your nation. The Law Library of Congress, in collaboration with the US government publishing office, has launched a large multi-effort -- a multi-year effort, excuse me, to digitize and make it accessible, the roughly 16,000 volumes of the serial set dating back to the first volume published in 1870. Next slide, please. The library is responsible for digitizing the volumes, and GPO will provide the metadata cataloguing each series set volume and document and authenticating the digital files. The digitized serial set will be available through both the Library of Congress and GPO websites, and possibly congress.gov which we are exploring. We are well underway with the full digitization project. Next slide, please. During this past fiscal year, law staff and contractors have reviewed serial set volumes for completeness and condition, tracked volumes through the review process and prepared a minimum of 875 volumes per quarter per shipment to the vendor. In fact, for quarters one and two, targets were exceeded. As a result of the pandemic and the limiting of staff on the library campus for four months, staff had to curtail the preparation of serial set volumes. However, effective July 20th, law staff resumed work at the library to prepare and finalize another shipment of 562 serial set volumes for digitization. We anticipate that the next shipment of 600 volumes will occur in mid to late October. So we're only a month off in meeting our target of 3,500 volumes prepared during fiscal year 2020. Next slide, please. In this snapshot in tableau, you're able to see all the serial set activities performed by our staff including volumes poll, best copy selected, volume shipped, digitized volumes we see, and the results of the quality assurance process. Next slide, please. In an effort to create new awareness of the rich resources within the US serial set, staff have published blogs on topics of interest found in the serial set volumes. Recently, staff have developed a story map presentation entitled From the Serial Set, the City of Washington, which traces the history of Washington DC through maps and reports found in the serial set and augmented by photographs from the library's collections. We'll continue highlighting this collection and look forward to forthcoming announcements with GPO of public releases of these digitized files. Thank you. >> Thank you so much [inaudible] panelists. I don't know about you all but I am super excited about the serial set. There's so much really cool information in there. It's just very exciting to me. OK. I hope that you found these updates informative, and it was useful to set some context before our discussion. But now it's time for us to hear from you. So the next hour or so will just be you and me together. And also the data partners will be listening and other various members of the Library of Congress staff. And we're mostly here to listen to what you came to share. But if you have questions from the previous talks, or anything else, we'd welcome those as well. Like I mentioned, there's lots of folks on the call from both Library of Congress and our broader data community. We're excited to have this moment to listen to you. We'll be keeping everybody muted just so we can hear clearly. But I do want to hear your voices. So if you have a comment or feedback that you'd like to share, drop a brief summary in Q&A. And then I will -- I'll call on you, either your -- by your summary that you shared or by your name and I'll unmute you so we can have a discussion. We do have a large number of participants where, you know, at the couple hundred range. So I'm going to ask if you could keep your comments to about two minutes. And I'd like to give everyone a chance. So we'll probably not call them the same person right after we've already called on them. But I do think with all the time we have available that everyone's -- a lot of time for everyone's comms to be heard. I'd like to encourage the panelists to jump in if there's anything that they particularly want to say. But otherwise, we'll really just be listening. You know, one of the answers I won't have for you today is when can we have or will we ever have, I think what I will have for you is, you know, a sense that we're really, really paying attention to what you need and to be able to share that with the rest of the community. Let's see. Another reminder that we have the survey available on congress.gov for two weeks. So if you -- if you'd like to share more after this event, after you reflect, please do that. And also if you have submitted a question earlier that I didn't get to, please feel free to submit that again. It's, you know, just too much to kind of scroll back to the other previous questions. So let's start with two corrections. One is Scott Matheson writes that in terms of copyrighted materials produced by federal employees in the course of their employment are exempted from copyright law, which is more precise. I really appreciate that. And there was another one. Oh, right. House and Senate lobbying and the financial disclosure data are on their websites. And law library staff can help the public find this information using Ask a Librarian. Is there somebody from LC who could drop a link to Ask a Librarian in the chat window? That would be helpful. OK. So let's start. Let's see. But maybe I could ask your question out loud. With the digitization of the serial set, our library will no longer needed to ProQuest congressional subscription. That's a great thing. Thank you, Miriam. That's really helpful. There is a question on historical CRS report access. OK, Taylor. >> Can you hear me? >> I can hear you, yes. Perfect, great. Thank you. My question is about reviewing and publishing historical CRS reports. Specifically, you know, the library already publishes recent CRS reports online. But many of these are already digitized historic CRS reports are in the CRSX archive, and they're unavailable from CRS, even though they're often available from like third party vendors for a fee. So my question is what steps is the library taking to evaluate and publish non-confidential CRS reports on its public facing CRS report website? >> I don't know if there's anybody from the panel who particularly would like to take this. But what I'm hearing from you is that there are CRS reports that are not available on the public website. And they're non-confidential, and you'd like to see that. >> Yeah, that's basically correct. Yes. >> OK. Great. I think we've -- we can note that unless anybody has something that they particularly need to say at this point. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Let's see. Daniel, you want to give it another shot? >> All right. Let's try that. Is this any better? >> Oh, yeah. We got you. All right. >> Amazing. So what you couldn't hear me say before was how much I appreciate all of you coming together to do this. It is such a pleasure to see all of your faces. It's been a while. I hope everybody is OK. The question that I had has to do with the summaries of legislation. So I believe CRS compared the summaries of bills and resolutions on congress.gov to help explain what's, you know, the language of the legislation in a way that people can better understand. I'm interested in learning more about how they're prepared when they're updated sort of like what's [inaudible] so that it's more understandable to the general public. So if there's someone available to talk about that, it would be really interesting to hear. So thank you. >> Thank you so much. I'm not sure if there's anybody on the panel that would like to take this. I think it's a really great question. I'm not sure if there's any material that we've already prepared. It seems like this is something that is a core part of our work that we could share as well. >> Hi. This is Kimberly. Kimberly Ferguson. I was on the panel earlier. I can take that. So, one of the things that Andrew Webber talked about that we are planning for the future is to have our searchable help content. And so, your question kind of about the background on those bill summaries is, is an excellent one. On congress.gov, we do try to have an about page for many of the different document types that we include on congress.gov. There's an about page for about the congressional record and about legislation text. And that's a really, really good suggestion. And we will discuss that with our data source, the folks who authored those bill summaries, they are an important data set. Thank you for pointing those out. And we will look into producing an about page that gives a little bit of background about those bill summaries. Right now in congress.gov, we have a glossary, in addition to the about pages that I encourage people to check out. And as Andrew said, we do have plans in the coming year to turn our help collection into a searchable content. And so, thank you for that suggestion and we will look into providing some more help material that explains a little bit about that really valuable resource. Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Kimberly. One from Jennifer on congressional district shapes. >> You answered it. Thank you very much. I don't know who is working on expanding into maps which part of LC, but I appreciate going into those congressional boundary maps and getting those to us. That'd be really cool. >> This is [inaudible] the clerk's office. I think we all -- on our website, Kate and Jennifer, we definitely are trying to incorporate the district maps where we can both in the bioguide.congress.gov website and then just the clerk's other websites and that in the GIS team at the library has been helpful in that. So thank you very much for that as well. >> Thank you. Margaret Wood [assumed spelling] on CONAN ratification data. >> Kate, hi. This is Kimberly. There is a really interesting question that I would love to address if there's time. >> Oh, sure. Yes. >> OK, very good. John Cannon asks, could steps be taken to better identify a bill that has been changed through an amendment between the houses, for example, starts out with the tax as one bill but is passed as something else? Yes. Thank you for asking that question. That person and myself have have been working quite a lot on working to get improved house amendment data. And both Robert and Andrew touched a little bit on some of the steps that we've taken. And we are headed in a really positive direction. So Kirsten mentioned the related bills tab on congress.gov. That's a really good place to be looking for that amendment data and how that is incorporated. We have very recently, as Andrew mentioned, incorporated committee prints into congress.gov. And we're working with our House colleagues to to get the text or the metadata available for House amendments, and link those to House committee reports and link those to House committee prints and to kind of flesh that out. We do also have on the related bills tab coming in the near future some other really helpful relationships between the House amendments and some of those resolutions and bill texts that are coming. So, if you have any follow-up questions on that, please do contact our Ask a Librarian colleagues. But we are working on this and it's kind of slow moving progress, but it is kind of exciting progress if you get excited about legislative data. >> I think we all do. Thank you, Kimberly. Margaret Wood, would you like to -- I think you're unmuted. Would you like to ask your question about CONAN? >> No, just the CONAN on congress.gov doesn't include the footnotes for the ratification data that you'll find in the version govinfo. And people frequently want that data. In all fairness, by the way, Kate, I'm with the law library. But that footnote with the ratification data by the states for each of the amendments is really useful information. And I think it's in the CONAN on congress.gov. I haven't been able to find it. >> Yes, I can speak to that. Can you hear me? >> Yeah. >> Good. It should be there now. And I'm just looking right quick to see if I can direct you to where it is on that. But we did take the comments and try to put that back there. So hold on one second. Because it should -- I believe it's now in the browser. But if not, I can send you -- if you send me an email, I can shoot you an email with just where exactly it is because we did put that in there. Because I know that there is a need for it. And so it should be there and I'm just having a little trouble locating where -- Here it is. It is an intro point five. If you go to the constitution.congress.gov website and you go to the browse Constitution Annotated, and you go to intro point five, there is a discussion on the ratification of amendments to the Constitution. And that information should be there. And if it is not there, I will make sure it's up there ASAP. But that's where it's supposed to be located. And that includes the information we had previously in the hard version, the hardcopy, but I really appreciate your interest in the website. And so thank you. >> Yeah. Thank you so much, Margaret. Up next is Sue Gardner with a question for the law library about the internship selection. Sue, you're unmuted. You can go ahead. >> Thank you. Yes, I was really interested to hear that you're using interns. That's wonderful. I wondered just how you manage the solicitation process, and how you recruited those people. >> Thanks for your question. This is Jennifer again, with the Law Library. We have done various methods. When we did this, at one point we had 75 interns, and at that point we reached out to all of -- we reached out actually to all 50 states, and to library programs and law programs to solicit those interns. Currently we have partnerships with several different universities that have -- especially that have online library graduate programs. And so we have kind of a constant stream and back and forth with those specific schools. We also leave up the -- just the application information on our website. And that is generally how we get a lot of the students that would like to come and work for us. And we don't have just students. We have lots of retirees and we have former librarians and retirees. And then we also have some people who are in between careers, searching for careers after they've graduated, or on maternity leaves and just want to put in a few hours to keep their resume and their skills up. >> That's fantastic. >> I'm sorry, please go ahead. >> That's all. That's fantastic. That's it. >> It's exciting to see the volunteers are involved in as well. In fact, we consider this one of our crowdsourcing projects at the library. It's, I think, a really good model for what we can do with with other people's help. And I did also want to mention LC labs has another project that they just completed a solicitation for. And it's to combine crowdsourcing and machine learning. And one of the things we want to test is whether or not we can use crowdsource information to train machine learning models to really amplify the labor of the people who are volunteering with us. And we'll drop a link to that solicitation in the chat. So you can read more about that if you're interested. I think it might be applicable to this particular domain. Amelia Strauss, if you'd like to ask your question, you can go ahead. >> Am I off mute? >> Yes, you are. >> Great. I just wanted to say thanks so much for having this event. It's been lots of great insight share this morning. My question is for congress.gov. Generally, as you may know, there's tends to be a window of time between when a bill is introduced and when it's actually the text is available. With the library have bandwidth or interest in creating a dashboard where users can see what's coming in one if it's not already up on the website. >> Does anybody on the panel have an answer for that? >> I think one of the things with that is if it's not published yet, it's harder for us to know that it's on the way. So as we go to govinfo for the data source for publishing the text, when it goes there, we get it almost immediately after it's published, and then just have a process to check to see when they think they're published and get it that way. But as far as something that hasn't yet been published, we don't have a good way to be notified of that so we can put something up. One of the things that we do do on congress.gov is we have a page where we discuss the historic material and what data is in the site. But it's more looking into the past. What's there versus what do we anticipate coming to the website? >> Got it. >> Great. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. Daniel Schumann next on structured data versus PDF. >> Yeah, sorry to come back around a second time, but I couldn't resist. So a lot of the conversation today I think has addressed different ways in which either information is being scanned or it's being otherwise dealt with. So there's all conversation around, you know, legislative XML and things along those lines. And there's obviously tons of ongoing digitization efforts. Some of them trying to transform information into structured data formats, others seems to be just making them as PDFs. PDFs, of course, are a difficult format for lots of us do it for all sorts of reasons, they certainly preserve the way things would look on paper but they're really hard to use for other purposes. So I have sort of the compound question. First part is like, how do you guys sort of think through whether you're going to turn something into a PDF, which is maybe faster but it's less useful versus going and trying to go and transform it into structured data? And the second sort of related question to that, and I hope you can't hear my kids too much in the background, is so one thing that the House does pretty well is that even when they publish a PDF, they often have an attached file behind it, that is the XML file. So if you're crazy and you want to go delving into Adobe, you can actually download the structure data so you can make use of it. For CRS reports to publish online publicly only as the PDF without the structured data behind it, although we do know that there is structured data that's behind it when it's generated, or semi-structured data generated within, will there be any efforts within the context of serious reports to go and release the semi-structured data behind it, even if it's just attaching it to the back of the PDF so that people who really, really want an structured format can get it that way? So how do you make the decision generally and then a specific application the context of serious reports? Thank you for the compound question. I appreciate that. >> I think that's a really good question. I'd first like to acknowledge that the usefulness of structured data. I mean, really, that was a focus of what the panel was talking about how structured data enables all these other uses that are beyond the sort of reading words on a page. And, you know, we -- there's a lot of ways in which the library provides structured data. I think in terms of the CRS reports, that's something that we're certainly considering. And it's really helpful to hear from those of you who would like to use it about ways in which you would like to use it, so that we can feed that back to sort of the prioritization decision making process. Is there somebody who have anything to say on the panel or should we move on? If you've already asked a question and I haven't gotten to it, please just add it again in the chat. It's really hard to sort of -- you know, I've tried to get everyone to turn so I've skipped over some. So I may have missed yours and I want to make sure everybody gets a chance to talk. So Alex Howard has a question. >> Awesome. OK. Well, thank you so much for hosting this. It's wonderful to see you virtually. I wish we could be sitting in the capital of Library of Congress. But here we are. And it's great. The technology is working. And it has a robust Q&A. It's wonderful that you're taking the questions in text and answering them in audio. It's a great combo. So kudos in making this work in an unprecedented time. And for all the improvements to these websites, because boy, I was always spending lots of time on them before, but I'm spending even more time now. So the question I ask is, again, about congressional social media. You know, LLC has this wonderful end of term crawl. And, you know, you've got established agreements with an archive, you work with all kinds of citizen archivists and collaborative librarian efforts. It's a wonderful thing. But to my question, it sounds like there's no plan right now, to crawl and archive congressional social media. And I can tell you that the content that has been posted there is often not ending up on on the congressional website. So, you know, to, you know, Jim's answer to me, that means that it will be lost. And, you know, we -- I know that the Federal Records Act doesn't extend on to these records. But, you know, a lot of folks I think would be understandably concerned if there are a lot of official communication statements, records generated by member offices that were not captured. And, you know, in reviewing the LLC's past approaches, it seems like your digital acquisition efforts in thinking around this do encompass social media and different kinds of records in that the status right now would allow you to go and get this kind of content. And I wanted to exhort you all in your position to look at how to go ahead and do this in a proactive way in the next five months, because if members leave office, they might well simply delete their accounts, right? And then the records are maybe lost to posterity. And as I'm sure everyone involved is aware, a great deal of public information and engagement is happening on these platforms now that doesn't make its way back to the websites and will simply disappear. So it seems like there's existing authorities. I understand there might be some challenges around staffing and capacity. It would be wonderful if you all could consider the need and then come back to the public with some kind of plan to work with us with archivists, librarians, journalists, nonprofits, whatever, to get this cohort is social media archive and then figure out what's needed to do it going forward. And I wish that Congress would catch up and give you all explicit authority to work with now, you know, to get all three branches of government. I know that they're likely to not be focused on that before the end of this term. Do you see room within your existing capacity, your existing mission, your existing resources to proactively go out and make sure that least that official member content is captured across the most popular platforms, those been Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube? >> Alex, thank you so much for the kind words and also for this really provocative question. You know, obviously, that the member statements and social media are an important part of the historical record. I wish somebody from the web archiving team was on the call who could more precisely address your question. Because I know we do -- so the web archiving team is sort of separate from the congress.gov team. It's, you know, it's about building reference collections for the library. And we do archives social media accounts through the web archiving team. So I can give you a more precise answer to your question later. But I do think that we acknowledge that that material is really important to understanding the legislative history and the context in which legislative information is being created. Anything else from the panel who would like to jump in? OK. Alex, I will I will get back to you with more information on that. >> Thank you so much. >> One more detail. One more detail. OK. I just -- yes, I agree. It's an excellent question. And I do want to throw out that just very, very recently, on congress.gov, to the footer we did add a link to the congressional web archive. So we are on the path and we are aware and we really do appreciate the feedback but that -- so that first step has been taken. >> What additional thing I just throw in queue for the record too that goes to the excellence of your archiving and teams is that a lot of this discussion right now has been focused upon open, accessible, structured government information so-called open government data. So much of social media activity is not accessible. Members routinely post pictures, video, pictures of statements, pictures of texts that are not accessible to Americans with all accessibility challenges. So someone is using a screen reader, you simply won't be able to see that. And as you think about tackling this challenge this year going forward, I just say that the Library of Congress and theoretically working with [inaudible] has an extraordinary opportunity to make these communications accessible, and also through our mind members that they have responsibility to inform and engage all Americans, including those who may not be able to see or hear what they're posting in those forums. And that if your role would be to ensure that these kinds of records are accessible to all, I think it would be a really meaningful place for your mission to be expressed. >> Thank you, Alex. >> Thank you. >> I -- Ann Bomb [assumed spelling], if you if you'd like to talk -- I'm sorry that I skipped over you a little bit earlier. So if you'd like to talk, I think you're unmuted now. OK, Ann. If you're -- If you come back, please just pop a link into the Q&A. There's another question from Sue Gardner. >> Hello. I'm just following up on the internship thing with which I think is just amazing. Again, is there a list of the interns available, please, especially with the states listed, I'm wondering if there are any for my particular state which is Nebraska and I would be interested in that because we don't have a library school program but there are some nearby? Thank you. >> Hi. Thank you for the question. Off the top of my head I am not sure. I don't believe I have in this semester, which is all the things going on in my head right now. I know we have Wisconsin and I'm not sure because right now everyone's doing so many remote items. I do know that we've reached out to every country -- every country -- every city. Not every city, I'm sorry, every state. We reached out to every state at various times but we certainly don't discriminate against any different state or any different program. So I -- we did do a blog post recently that you can check and that highlighted all of our 50 interns and when they live in which country or which schools they go to. And so yeah, I think that would be the best place to look for our past interns and I do not get the list available just because of privacy issues. >> Yeah. Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. >> I think all the questions have been really excellent so far. I just want to remind you that if you've got suggestions or requests or anything like that, I really do want to make sure that we have time to hear all of your wants and needs and ideas. So it looks like I've come to the end of my list. So if I've missed one of yours, please repost it in the Q&A. I'm so sorry about that. And please continue to add more. Daniel Schumann, again. >> Did you miss me? Hi, everyone. Sorry -- >> We did. >> So, you know, Kate, you are running this amazing collaborative effort with the public to crowdsource tons and tons of stuff, which is really cool. And we had talked earlier in the conversation about possible collaborative opportunities around legislative information in crowdsourcing and having, you know, like, there was discussion around all those interns. Well, I know there's a lot of people out there as well, that will be more than happy to help like add data as well, particularly to get the Statutes at Large available. We ran a similar project to that eight years ago and we built a crowdsourcing effort to go in and identify and basically transcribe that information. But the question that I have here is not about collaboration on transcription, the collaboration on technology. There is, as I think all of you know, you know, a huge community out there of developers and coders and engineers and other folks who are thrilled to build and co-create stuff. The library has a GitHub page, not for legislative information but for other stuff, I believe. GPO, of course, has a great place for people can put comments in collaborate and so forth. But the really at least not as far as I'm aware, there hasn't been a collaborative effort around legislative information services. I think Josh Tauber [assumed spelling] had asked a question earlier for us, he has GovTrack, which has a million unique visitors a month around legislative information. We have our comparatively tiny CRS webpage with 125,000 unique visitors a month. And many of us, journalists, like routinely build or co-build or collaborate in different places. And I was wondering about the library's interest in collaborating on technology, whether it's willing to, one, use open source technology for the things that it builds, but also to collaborate on how it builds things and how to improve its services and things along those lines. So is there a space? Is there an opportunity around legislative information services for people on the outside and on the inside to collaborate on building and maintaining and improving the technology so it doesn't just fall on the library but rather can be something that we all co-create together? So thank you for that question. >> That's such a great question. And, you know, one that's near and dear to my heart. You know, I'd like to mention that the digital strategy, which we published a few years ago, if you'd like to read it, I know you've read it, Daniel, but if anybody else would like to read it, it's at loc.gov/digital-strategy mentions that we have a commitment to using open source software whenever is, you know, maximally effective for the library, but also to contribute. And you mentioned our GitHub page. I think one theme of today's conversation is that we would love to do more than we can, you know? We're limited by our funding and by our attention and that, you know, help from all of you who feel so passionately about this would be one way that we could, you know, sort of do more with what we have. So I'd like to mention that the crowdsourcing project that you mentioned by the people does have an open source repository was built from the open from the very beginning, I think the first software project that we have, that was done that way. And so what one of the things we're really hoping for is people use that software in their own domain. And so, one of one of the possibilities would be for somebody on this call to repurpose that software to do some crowdsourcing on their own. Let's see. I forgot really -- Yeah. >> Can I add this something too? This is [inaudible], the director of IT design and development at the Library of Congress. Let me just add to Daniel's question that congress.gov is built on open source technologies. We use solar for the underlying search engine and we have contributed back to the open source community. So we're absolutely involved and engaged with working with the open source community on these tools to make the legislative data available. >> Yup. I'd like to just talk briefly about the crowdsourcing application that we do have up and running, which, you know, we were proud to launch as one of our first experiments in LC labs and is now in, you know, fully -- like a full product in its own right run by the library services. And one of the core values that we've used when we design this. So Meghan Ferriter came from the Smithsonian transcription center to the Library of Congress to help launch this. One of her -- you know, she wrote design, design framework, which is also available in the GitHub, and one of the core values is trust. And so, one of the ways we're able to scale crowdsourcing on the collection side, is because we don't have staff checking every transcription. Because we have really found no evidence of vandalism or ill intent. The risk profile for congressional information changes because there's a lot more public interest and also a lot more potential danger, if there's errors and mistakes. So I think that I'm certainly interested in having additional conversations about crowdsourcing opportunities here. But, you know, just for your consideration, those are sort of things that we need to think through as we went forward. Anybody else? I cannot believe we're out of questions at this moment. I know that you have more questions. I know that you have more things to say. If we end early, I'm going to lose a very substantial bet. I'm just kidding. It would be illegal to bet as a government employee and I would not do that. Daniel, you've got a question. Go, man. OK. I don't mean this to be all about me. But I guess that's what's becoming this moment. So the national archives has made use in the past civil Wikipedia in residence, and the library is a source of such amazing information. But part of what gives it the great reach that it has is that a lot of it is pre-published elsewhere. I mean, you guys are upstream or actually the House and Senate are often upstream, but sometimes it's the library that's upstream in [inaudible] of downstream add additional value, where the New York Times and The Washington Post and ProPublica and everyone else makes use of that information. And I'm thinking a bit about how can the library build partnerships with other folks to continue to raise this information. Of course, there's the great FDLP network, the -- what I was thinking of, of course was the the National Archives example with Wikipedia in residence, I don't know if there's any consideration of having Wikipedia in residence at the library, or other efforts to sort of bring some of the folks on the outside in and take more of the folks on the inside out. I know the [inaudible] taskforce in the legislative data transparency conference and today's event is part of that effort. But it seems that there's a space for a lot more interchange, you know, millions of people go to the library's website, but the number one search result on just about anything is Wikipedia. And, of course, when you Google for stuff, I mean, whether you like Google or not like, you know, those -- they take their synopsis from Wikipedia. Are there places, are there ways, are there mechanisms by which folks with a lot of reach from the outside can come in and partner with the library and vice versa? Because it would truly extend reach both for data and information and the thing that we're all trying to get at which is context so people can make information that -- decision that they need to be relevant in this political space. So, any responses that'd be wonderful to hear. Thank you. >> That's such a great question. And I'm sorry to interrupt if I just got excited. Yeah. And I think all of you, if you -- if any of you have read the digital strategy, one of the things that we're trying to pivot is to be where our users are. So, you know, it's, it's sort of hard to -- I mean, all of you are congress.gov users, I assume, otherwise, you know, this is weird entertainment for you. You know, like to type in congress.gov. But my parents don't. You know, they don't -- most people don't know that there's a website called congress.gov, where they can find legislative information. They do, as you said, they Google something, Wikipedia comes up, YouTube comes up, something comes up and that's where they find their information. And we'd like to make sure that that information there is the authoritative information. And so one of the -- you know, I mentioned the digital strategy, we want to be where the users are. This was illustrated really well for us. If any of you are familiar with the Chronicling America website, Chronicling America is a website where we put up digitized newspapers from, I think, we think we have all 50 states now but I'm probably wrong. We almost have all 50 states, I think maybe 49. So NEH sponsors the digitisation, they pay for the digitization, and they also sponsor our ability to put all of those up in a single website. And a few years, we started releasing that information, unstructured data. And what we found actually was that more -- we found more traffic driven to the congress.gov site, but also more authoritative information in other places we spent. We found data publishers and other genealogical search engines sharing it. And so it was very clear to us that that is a way that we can really get more out of what the government -- what the American people are paying for in terms of our services. And so, in terms of Wikipedia, particularly, we've been in touch with them, especially with their link data project. To me, I think that's one of the areas that we can really have a great intersection. So they're in wiki data, they've used our authority records and some other sources of data. I think, you know, having a Wikipedia in residence would be a, you know, very interesting idea. We have definitely done like edit [inaudible] to change the Thomas links in Wikipedia to congress.gov. And having a more focused person would be interesting. We had, we did have one in residence for another project. And that was an interesting experience and definitely helped drive traffic to the site. Let's see. Maybe we can talk about what that. There's just so much -- It's so much interesting here to to explore it, I think. >> Well, I'm just thinking of, for example, the law library has these phenomenal foreign law reports that need to be seen more. And when you look at CRS reports that are linked to on Wikipedia, oftentimes they link to Steve Aftergood's website, or they link to our website. And if there is a primary authoritative source, should be going there. And similarly, if there's stuff that should be infused in the other direction, you know, one of the things that often concerns me is when people -- I'll use the [inaudible] because it's an easy example. But this happens in the context of legislation. They linked to the wrong thing. So right, when people were looking trying to read about Obamacare, the number one item on congress.gov website was actually the wrong bill, people reading the wrong bill. And that was because it was being driven by a place that had missing parts identified in park as people searching for it. But if you go and you can push out the context, and you can have that conversation where people understand better how to find things like that collaboration means that people are more likely to find the right information at the right time. And see the most up to date version, like one of the things that was -- sorry, I'll get off the [inaudible]. But one thing that was very frustrating was when people would look at an older version of a CRS report where the information had been superseded but they didn't realize it. And the more that you can have sort of this bridge building, you can make sure that people are finding the right thing at the right time. And since you work so hard to make sure that it's accurate that they're finding the most accurate up to date version. So that's part of what's driving I think in here is like how do we not just not just like receive stuff in at the library, but also push stuff out, so that it meets in the middle and sort of addresses the needs that people don't even realize that they necessarily have the time. >> I think there's also I think-- No, I think that's all really good. And I think there's also a role here to play for us in digital strategy to talk -- to do more staff outreach and training and, you know, encourage people to be thinking about this as they go along their daily professional lives. >> Thank you. >> There's a question from Lorelei Kelly [assumed spelling] in the chat. Lorelei, would you like? Would you like to talk? >> OK. Jennifer, if you're not -- I'm sorry, Lorelei cannot able to unmute. I'll lead your question. Could someone talk about the digital transformation of the federal depository libraries? There are 1,200 plus of them. And it seems like they might be able to act as a local more participatory archives for policy relevant data. Oh, that's a really good question. >> Sure. This is Lisa from GPL. I'll take that one. And that's an absolutely wonderful, wonderful comment. So for those that don't know, the federal depository library program is a network of around 1,200 depository libraries and libraries around the country that have traditionally received publications from GPO. So in the past, those publications were primarily in print format, so printed publications with be sent to libraries around the country. As we've progressed along in the 21st century and even in the 1990s, we saw a shift from those publications being made available in print formats to digital formats. So definitely there's definitely a role in terms of federal depository libraries and digital transformation. I would also encourage folks to participate in the depository library program virtual meeting coming up here in October. And I will post information about that in the chat if anyone would like to register for that. So that's another great forum for collaboration, both in this community and throughout the depository library community. >> I can confirm that the federal depository library community meeting is awesome. And I think you'll find some really like-minded individuals there. If you want to participate, they're kind of a really lovely group of people. Lorelei, would you like -- I think you're unmuted now. If you'd like to ask a follow-up question. Lorelei, is that you? >> Hi. Can you hear me? I'm sorry, I'm in rural New Mexico and so have really uneven signal. >> We sure can. >> Thank you for that. >> Thank you for that question. And while Lorelei types, I think we're at the end of our list of questions or comments. And so I'd like to encourage you to share whatever you -- whatever is on your mind. I mean, not really whatever is on your mind. Whatever is on your mind related to legislative data. You know, there are many things on our mind right now. I have a first grader in the background watching YouTube right now. That's not my mind, but specifically legislative data. James. James Jacobs, would you like to ask your question, with your voice instead of your fingers? >> Hi, Kate. This is James Jacobs. Thanks for letting me use my voice and not my fingers. I've really enjoyed this whole session today. I'm just wondering -- And thanks for the shout out to the FDLP, the depository library program. Yet, there are a lot of libraries like the one that I work in that are working hard to try and shift into the digital realm. But I'm just wondering if you're recording this and if it'll be available after the fact for some of my colleagues who haven't been able to make it today. >> First, I just want to say it's lovely to hear from you, James. And that's a great question. Thank you. I think the forum is being recorded. But I think we're likely to distill it instead of making it available as a whole, just in terms of respect for people's time. And so what we'll do is we'll post the, you know, the presentations, and also sort of distill some of the conversation into a blog post. And I think I would encourage all of you to make liberal use of the comments if their view felt that that distillation doesn't reflect -- accurately reflect the conversation. >> Thank you. Hope I get to see you soon. >> Me too. I mean, I hope I get to see all of you soon. This is not really planned but it's I think better than nothing, so. >> Hear, hear. >> Let's see. OK. Lorelei's question is the follow up is about the Kluge Center as an internal information intermediary, which is great alliteration for subject matter expertise locally, a curation engine. And I'm not sure what that means, if anybody else does know. I mean, so for those of you who don't know what the Kluge Center is, you know, the Library of Congress is a very strange library in that we don't have, you know, a local patron base and we don't have staff or students. But the Kluge Center is a sort of an in-house academic research center where people come for brief periods to use library's resources for research and they also give a lot of talk. And if that's sort of thing is your thing, it's really, really fun. You should check out their website. So -- But I'm not really sure what you're referring to in terms of internal and formal intermediary for subject matter expertise, locally in terms -- is that in terms of collection development? I don't know. If someone else understands this better than I do, which is true about many things, please, please do jump in. John Quan [assumed spelling], would you like to ask your question? John Quan. Well, I'll read John's message aloud. Oh, is that you, John? >> Yeah. I -- >> Good. [Inaudible]. Oh. So, John Quan wants to know what my first grader's favorite legislative data set is. And I think it's got to be the serial set. It's everybody's favorite. OK. Anybody else? We've got a couple more minutes. And I really -- you know, we've got it. We've got to squeeze all the juice we can out of this. >> Kate, can you hear me? >> I sure can. Who's that? >> This is Brian Baird. I didn't know if I was off mute so I had put a sign up there. >> Hey, there. >> Hey, thank you so much for this great presentation. I want to follow up on something that Daniel mentioned earlier. And that is it's not just the House or the Library of Congress that's not well accessed by the American public. There are several other very prominent federal institutions that have tremendous information but the public doesn't get at it and neither do the legislators. And that includes, for example, the National Academies of Science. And one of the things I think we'd be very interested in pursuing is how can the Library of Congress, the National Academy of Sciences, and other similar information gathering and analytics organizations better coordinate and communicate with the public but particularly also with state legislative entities. We've got all this great data. And yet state legislatures don't have you as a resource. They don't often have very much staff. They don't have a TRS and GAO, et cetera. And if you take any given problem, many state legislators share a concern. Maybe it's the opioid epidemic. Maybe it's COVID in the current time, but they don't have the best available social science and other hard science data and trying to find a way to coordinate and communicate that information across those various levels of resource and need could be incredibly productive. >> Thank you, Brian. That's really helpful and a great suggestion. OK, everybody. We're at the end of our time together, unfortunately. I want to thank you all for sticking with us for so long. This was a ton of time out of your valuable schedules. And I we really, really appreciate it. I do want to remind you that the survey on congress.gov will be up for a while longer. I think another week, is that right? Another week or two. Jim will clarify. So it's up for another two weeks. So if we didn't get to your question, which I don't think that's possible, but if you have other ideas later, please do, you know, fill that survey out. And to close this out, I'd like to introduce Jim Karamanis, the director of IT design and development at the Library of Congress. Jim's team built congress.gov, and they deliver the continuous improvement you want to see on the site. Thank you so much. >> Kate, thank you so much for doing just a wonderful job moderating this forum. I want to thank all of our legislative data partners, the Senate, the House, the government publishing office. As you can see, the relationships that we have amongst the legislative branch, they're real. And these people actually really enjoyed working together. They're all passionate about making this data available to the public. So this is an infectious attitude that we have. And we really look forward to receiving all the feedback that we get from the public. It absolutely gets put into our backlog and becomes the data -- becomes the work that we work on. So thanks to all of you for taking the time to give us your feedback. Please continue to do so via the feedback form on congress.gov. Everything that gets submitted we read and is part of what we work on. So that's really it. Again, thanks for all of your time, and we look forward to hosting again very soon. >> Thanks, everybody. Talk soon. Have a great day.

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 4,971

Rating: 4.0588236 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Congress

Id: Kxb9f3Ygm54

Length: 171min 53sec (10313 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020