PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS

An important component in the development and improvement of a legislative information system should be an ongoing, coordinated program of evaluation, testing, and implementation of tools that can improve productivity both for creators and for users of the system. For example, under the distributed system proposed in this plan, various groups would be responsible for the preparation and tagging of data to standard specifications. A new piece of software that can make this process more efficient will benefit everyone. Similarly it would be valuable to encourage the development of automatic retrieval features that would benefit all users, such as allowing them to specify whether they wanted to search for an exact phrase, to search comprehensively for all variants of the words in a phrase (e.g., balanced budget, balancing the budgets, bringing the budget in balance with..., etc.), or search effectively for variations in the expression of an idea (e.g., ...ensure that federal expenditures match federal revenue generation...).

The selection of productivity tools for evaluation should be the result of a thorough understanding of the requirements of data creators and of users, balanced against technical opportunities. The basic principle is that resources spent on this effort should be business driven rather than technology driven. However, the testing program should be carried out by staff who have both a Hill-wide view and who also can gauge the potential of emerging technology to meet a variety of Hill-wide requirements.

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