DATA COORDINATION AND PREPARATION

The study of duplication among legislative tracking systems cited above noted that while there had been a concerted effort to reduce duplication of effort in the creation of legislative data, there were still opportunities for making this process more efficient. One of the primary tasks of the Working Group should be to establish guidelines for reducing duplication of effort and for increasing the efficiency of data preparation. The Library proposes the following guidelines for the Working Group to consider in addressing these issues.

  1. Data should be created and validated by the office or organization specifically responsible for that data. For example, the Clerk of the House should be the source for House floor actions, House floor amendments, etc., the Secretary of the Senate for similar information from the Senate, etc.

  2. The proposed Working Group should resolve any issues related to the duplication of information.

  3. The system should contain a digital version that is an exact duplicate of the printed version of each official legislative document.

  4. Identifying and supporting methods for obtaining timely data from committees on proposed and completed legislative activities (e.g., hearings, markups, reports, etc), without imposing undue burdens on committees, should be a special objective of the Working Group.

  5. The Working Group should consider the potential role of commercial services, and determine whether and how such services could be integrated with the Congressional system. (See discussion below under the heading DATA SOURCES: COMMERCIAL AND NON-GOVERNMENT.)

  6. With respect to the current overlap between the GPO and LOC systems, the following is proposed.

GPO would continue to maintain an official digital version of congressional documents for which they are responsible in an electronic format that mirrors the printed format.5 As directed in PL103-40, and in coordination with the Working Group, GPO would continue to create and add congressional documents in an official digital format.

The Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress would create and maintain an annotated version of bills that would include:

  1. Explanations added to the text of the bill itself when necessary to understand the effect of the bill.6 This often occurs when the bill amends an existing statute, and it is necessary to research the U.S. Code to have a full understanding of the bill. It can also be useful to have such explanations for summarizing long textual provisions.

  2. Direct links between the annotated bill and legislative support agency publications (e.g, CRS, GAO, and CBO reports) that provide information relevant to the bill.

  3. Direct links from the bill to the most current version of the U.S. Code so that the user could more easily review the relevant portions of the Code directly.

The Library would continue to receive, as it does now, the status, sponsors and cosponsors, and committees of referral or origin of bills. The Library would also continue to integrate this information with the annotated version of the bill to provide a more complete system for search and retrieval of bills, and to link this data to the relevant portions of the full text of the online Record.

The CRS would continue to digest bills, as it does now, but would focus greater attention on providing timely summaries of bills receiving congressional action. Congressional staff could call CRS directly to obtain an explanation of a bill that had not yet been annotated or summarized.

GPO and LOC would work closely together to ensure the close integration of their systems so that the congressional user could move easily between the annotated and the official version of a bill.

The Working Group would determine, after an analysis of the resources required, whether it was feasible and cost-effective to create linked and/or annotated versions of other congressional publications, e.g., committee reports, hearings, the Record, etc.

One of the most important challenges for the Working Group in implementing these guidelines will be to achieve the optimum balance among the requirements to reduce duplication of effort, ensure synchronization of databases that will be created for various functions, and reduce the cost of data preparation. For example, with regard to the above proposal that the LOC create an annotated bill file and that the GPO create an official electronic file, there are a number of technical issues. Should the LOC create its annotated file from a database derived from the GPO master file and stored on a Library server? It might be more cost-effective to create the annotated file this way, but how would the Library and the GPO ensure that the annotated file was always synchronized with the official file? Alternatively, if the preferred technical solution were to create a single master SGML database with the LOC annotations as one of the tagged elements, how would a database of this complexity affect response times at user workstations? These are issues that the GPO and the LOC will have to work on together, with the Working Group approving the solution(s).

There are various technical options for meeting each of these requirements, and new options will become available as the marketplace generates new technical tools. It is likely therefore that the optimum solution will change over time. The Working Group will have to implement flexible solutions that can adapt new technologies as they become viable.

5 GPO currently does this by providing what is referred to as a portable document format (PDF) version of bills, the Congressional Record, and other congressional documents. The specific technology used to do this is not as important (the technology will continue to evolve) as the fact that the GPO is able to do this efficiently as a result of its production operations for preparing and printing bills, the Record, etc.

6 These explanations would be created through a modification of the procedures used to prepare digests of bills, a task which CRS is already required to perform. (see 49 STAT 471; 2 USC 166 (d)(6))

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