I am sharing some interesting information from the Library of Congress. On November 24th they posted this blogpost about Native American languages on the general blog. “Two important collections of Native American heritage have been digitized and placed on the Library’s website, enabling readers and researchers to dig into histories that are not widely known.
The first, featuring portions of the papers of Indian agent and ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, focuses on the culture and literature of famed 19th-century Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay) and bicultural collaborations and literary contributions of members of her Johnston family of Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan Territory.
The second, some of the papers of naturalist and ethnographer C. Hart Merriam, documents California Indian vocabularies collected from Indigenous language speakers from many different tribal heritages during the first three decades of the 20th century, mostly from California and the adjacent borderlands of Oregon and Nevada.
Both collections provide resources that tribal nations, libraries and cultural centers can use for language revitalization and tribal history documentation, part of the Library’s Native American Collections Working Group’s chief goals. They are housed in the Manuscript Division with other Native American holdings.”
Next on November 27th the law Library of Congress blog In Custodia Legis posted a blogpost Modernizing Congressional Data – House Legislation and Amendments on Congress.gov.
“In the fifth installment of our series on modernizing the legislative data exchange behind Congress.gov, we look at the project’s final phase – modernizing the data structure and delivery method for House of Representatives bills and amendments.
Senate and House legislative data must be made available to Congress and the public in accordance with two laws passed by Congress in the mid-1990s:
- 2 U.S.C. 180 – Legislative information retrieval system; and
- 2 U.S.C. 181 – Program for exchange of information among legislative branch agencies.
As with all things technology-based, the congressionally mandated retrieval system that is now known as Congress.gov has evolved over time. Most of the changes have been made at the request of congressional staff, who need more features and functions to do their work more efficiently.
The efforts to modernize the data structure and delivery method have primarily been behind the scenes, but have resulted in immediate improvements for the end-user experience, as well as laying the groundwork for future enhancements. In addition, more standardized data resulting from the modernization efforts have allowed us to use more automation to help monitor for data discrepancies.
Each day, Congress.gov receives a series of bill and amendment metadata files from the House of Representatives. The first delivery, in the wee hours of the morning, provides the metadata framework for each bill or amendment introduced or acted upon the previous day, including unique identifiers, titles, sponsor and cosponsor data, actions, and committee-level activity. Subsequent deliveries include executive actions on bills, which provide nearly “real time” updates when bills are presented to the president for signature.
A future enhancement in the pipeline is to show more “Legislative Interest” relationships in Congress.gov. “Legislative interest” is a common House practice where committee chairs publish letters in the Congressional Record acknowledging that they have made a cooperative agreement about a bill that was referred to one committee but in which another committee has jurisdictional interest. The letters on page H1450 of the March 27, 2023, Congressional Record are an example of “legislative interest” letters.
Modernization efforts, as well as enhancements, are implemented through close collaboration between the Library of Congress and the House of Representatives. We conducted months of planning followed by additional extensive testing, including incorporating unique scenarios, such as committee hearings held on bills before the bills were referred to the committee. The end result has achieved the goal of improved data exchange and processing with no diminished end-user experience.”
The Law Library of Congress posted its “In the fifth installment of our series on modernizing the legislative data exchange behind Congress.gov, we look at the project’s final phase – modernizing the data structure and delivery method for House of Representatives bills and amendments.
Senate and House legislative data must be made available to Congress and the public in accordance with two laws passed by Congress in the mid-1990s:
- 2 U.S.C. 180 – Legislative information retrieval system; and
- 2 U.S.C. 181 – Program for exchange of information among legislative branch agencies.
As with all things technology-based, the congressionally mandated retrieval system that is now known as Congress.gov has evolved over time. Most of the changes have been made at the request of congressional staff, who need more features and functions to do their work more efficiently.
The efforts to modernize the data structure and delivery method have primarily been behind the scenes, but have resulted in immediate improvements for the end-user experience, as well as laying the groundwork for future enhancements. In addition, more standardized data resulting from the modernization efforts have allowed us to use more automation to help monitor for data discrepancies.
Each day, Congress.gov receives a series of bill and amendment metadata files from the House of Representatives. The first delivery, in the wee hours of the morning, provides the metadata framework for each bill or amendment introduced or acted upon the previous day, including unique identifiers, titles, sponsor and cosponsor data, actions, and committee-level activity. Subsequent deliveries include executive actions on bills, which provide nearly “real time” updates when bills are presented to the president for signature.
A future enhancement in the pipeline is to show more “Legislative Interest” relationships in Congress.gov. “Legislative interest” is a common House practice where committee chairs publish letters in the Congressional Record acknowledging that they have made a cooperative agreement about a bill that was referred to one committee but in which another committee has jurisdictional interest. The letters on page H1450 of the March 27, 2023, Congressional Record are an example of “legislative interest” letters.
Modernization efforts, as well as enhancements, are implemented through close collaboration between the Library of Congress and the House of Representatives. We conducted months of planning followed by additional extensive testing, including incorporating unique scenarios, such as committee hearings held on bills before the bills were referred to the committee. The end result has achieved the goal of improved data exchange and processing with no diminished end-user experience.”
On December 16th Andrew Weber posted The 2024 Congress.gov Top 24 and Year in Review in this blogpost. “One of my favorite posts to do for In Custodia Legis is the annual recap for Congress.gov. Last year was terrific, and this year we were able to keep building on that success. We have been working on incorporating the Century of Lawmaking site into Congress.gov. With the first release of 2024, we added PDFs of the Congressional Globe and Register of Debates to the Browse page. We followed this by adding the House and Senate Journals from Century in PDF to the Browse page.
After that, we added the Annals of Congress Page Headings and Index to the site. Working with our Senate data partners, we were able to add Senate Committee Meeting videos. You can watch the videos from Senate items on the Committee Schedule.
In March, we made a big update to our API based on user feedback. We increased the Congress.gov API rate limit from 1,000 requests to 5,000 per hour. Later in the year, we incorporated our Glossary of Legislative Terms to our Congress.gov Help Center. In July, we added a new Appropriations Resources Video to Congress.gov. Later in July, we were able to add the “Download Results” feature to the Command Line search. In August, the Legislative Status Steps image from H.Prt. 94-54857 was added to Congress.gov. Robert also announced that our Congress.gov Public Forum would be on September 18. It is available to watch if you missed it.
We continued to update and enhance the Century of Lawmaking content on Congress.gov when we added the Senate Journal to search in November. It is now much more accessible to search and browse than when it was just in PDF. Later that month, we added the House Journal from Century. We are actively working on finishing the Senate Executive Journal and are getting closer to launching the Congressional Globe.
We continued to do Congress.gov interviews so you can better know the people who help produce the website. Early in 2024, Legislative Analysis and Services Section Head Barbara Perkins was interviewed. We also did interviews with our data partners from the House and Senate. We were pleased to feature John Pollock, the director of the Legislative Information System Project Office, and Christy Amatos, an assistant parliamentarian. They both work for the Senate. The Legislative Counsel of the House of Representatives Wade Ballou was also interviewed.
Data Modernization
We have worked very hard on modernizing Congressional data over the last few years. This year we were able to retire some older servers thanks to this effort. Over the course of this year, we were able to share a behind the scenes look at this. Cassidy Charles kicked the series off with our efforts to modernize executive communications. She followed this up with a look at the nominations data modernization. Andrew Reiter shared three of our data modernization updates. His first was on treaty documents. It was followed by Senate and then House legislation and amendments.”
I wish everyone a very peaceful end to this not so peaceful year and a hope for a happy new year.
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