Schuman on GPO’s New and Improved U.S. Statutes at Large, with Bulk Metadata in MODS

Daniel Schuman, Esq., of the Sunlight Foundation, has posted GPO is Closing Gap on Public Access to Law at JCP’s Direction, But Much Work Remains, on the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

The post describes the U.S. Government Printing Office’s making available United States Statutes at Large, 1951-2009, with full text for individual statutes in PDF and .txt formats, and for entire volumes in PDF format, and metadata for individual statutes and in bulk for each volume in MODS format.

For example, click here for bulk metadata for volume 123 of U.S. Statutes at Large, in MODS format.

Here are excerpts from the post:

The GPO’s recent electronic publication of all legislation enacted by Congress from 1951-2009 is noteworthy for several reasons. It makes available nearly 40 years of lawmaking that wasn’t previously available online from any official source, narrowing part of a much larger information gap. It meets one of three long-standing directives from Congress’s Joint Committee on Printing regarding public access to important legislative information. And it has published the information in a way that provides a platform for third-party providers to cleverly make use of the information. While more work is still needed to make important legislative information available to the public, this online release is a useful step in the right direction. [...]

In mid-January 2013, GPO published approximately 32,000 individual documents, along with descriptive metadata, including all bills enacted into law, joint concurrent resolutions that passed both chambers of Congress, and presidential proclamations from 1951-2009. The documents have traditionally been published in print in volumes known as the “Statutes at Large,” which commonly contain all the materials issued during a calendar year. [...]‘

The online release of the Statutes at Large from 1951 forward, accompanied by good quality metadata, has made it possible for the public to see important (and not so important) legislation. [...] Of course, the major New Deal legislation, such as the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, and anything from the last quarter of the 19th century, is still unavailable from GPO. And GPO/LOC still hasn’t incorporated the information it has released onto THOMAS. However, the free legislative information portal GovTrack already jumped in with both feet, incorporating this information on its website where users can easily search and find historical bills going back to 1951.

Depending on the quality of the searchable PDFs GPO has posted, it may also be just a matter of time before someone pull out the text from the PDFs and puts it into a database, too. That would improve the ability to search for bills and facilitate analysis of congressional activities. It also moves us one step closer to a very difficult but important goal: allowing people to see in real time how draft legislation would amend the law. For that to be possible, GPO would need to publish the Statutes at Large from prior to 1951 online in electronic form, including making clear the underlying structure of the statutes, plus there’d have to be some pretty significant advances in the tools available to parse legislative language. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

Access to U.S. Federal Court Decisions on FDsys Expanded to Permit All Federal Courts to Participate

Access to U.S. federal court decisions on the Government Printing Office (GPO)’s FDsys platform has been expanded to allow any federal court to choose to have its decisions made available on FDsys, according to a 31 January 2013 announcement by the Judicial Conference of the U.S.

Here is the text of the announcement:

A pilot project giving the public free, text-searchable, online-access to court opinions now is available to all federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts.

The Judicial Conference, the policy-making body of the Federal court system, approved national implementation of the project with the Government Printing Office, Federal Digital System (FDsys), which provides free access to publications from all three branches of federal government via the Internet. The pilot project pulls opinions nightly from courts’ Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) systems and sends them to the GPO, where they are processed and posted on the FDsys website. The functionality to transfer opinions to FDsys is included in the latest release of CM/ECF which is now available to all courts. Twenty-nine courts participated in the original pilot, and now, all courts may opt to participate in the program.

Access to judicial opinions through FDsys allows the Judiciary to make its work more easily available to the public. Collections are divided into appellate, district or bankruptcy court opinions and are text-searchable across opinions and across courts. FDsys also permits embedded animation and audio.

Presently, more than 600,000 opinions dating back to 2004 are available. Opinions from the pilot are already one of the most heavily used collections on FDsys, with millions of retrievals each month.

Benefits of access to these decisions on FDsys include that GPO authenticates the PDF version of each decision, GPO creates a descriptive metadata record for each decision in the interoperable MODS format, and developers can harvest decisions and metadata from a single site.

HT @EJWalters

U.S. GPO releases House bills in bulk XML

Today the U.S. Government Printing Office has begun making U.S. House of Representatives’ legislative bills available for bulk download in XML, at
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS

Currently, only bills from the current Congress are included.

The user guide provides more details about the data.

Click here for the GPO press release.

Click here for the Speaker’s office press release.

Release of the bills in bulk XML is a key goal of the #freeTHOMAS movement and a longstanding goal of the open government data community.

The House bills are the second major Congressional data set to be released in bulk XML this month; the first was the House floor proceedings in bulk XML.

Here are links to selected posts about the availability of this new legislative data set:

• Daniel Schuman: Access to Legislation Gets Better, Promise of More to Come
• Joshua Tauberer: On the new bulk bill XML from GPO
• Nick Judd: House Republicans Release More Data Catnip for Developers
• Alex Howard: Open data of U.S. House legislation now available in bulk format

Please see the comments to this post for links to additional resources about this issue.

CTG Albany on Authenticity and Integrity in Official Legal Information

New from @CTG_UAlbany : Opening Government’s Official Legal Materials: Authenticity and Integrity in the Digital World (2012).  

Here is the abstract:

Increasingly, state governments are moving toward making primary legal materials available online via state government websites. The goal in these efforts, and also the challenge, is to provide users with more efficient access while ensuring that the electronic versions of primary legal materials are as “official” as their paper originals. The desire of state governments to make this a priority is strong. However, they currently lack the necessary policies and management practices necessary for success. State legislators and their staffs, legislative reference librarians, state archivists, and chief information officers all have important roles to play in laying the foundation for these efforts through the creation of new policy, management, and technology capabilities. This brief provides background to the recently approved Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA), explores the concepts behind authenticated electronic materials, defines what it will take to create, maintain, and make available official electronic legal material, and provides recommendations for states.

HT @tpardo

Accessing PACER Cases Free of Charge

A procedure for accessing full text judicial decisions free of charge on PACER — the U.S. federal courts’ database of court decisions and litigation materials — has been posted by Mark Rosch. The procedure has been recently discussed by Nick Moline of Justia.

Oddly, this procedure does not seem to be mentioned in the FAQ on the PACER Website.

This functionality appears to have been introduced in 2005, according to a 2005 announcement from the PACER Service Center. (HT @sglassmeyer.) However, this information does not appear to be readily accessible on the PACER Website. In fact, to date, the PACER FAQ does not appear to make any mention of the availability of PACER cases free of charge.

Posting this procedure in the PACER FAQ — where, one would think, most PACER users are likely to look for information about the costs of using PACER — would seem to be in the public interest, because such posting is very likely to reduce PACER users’ costs of retrieving judicial decisions from PACER, and to encourage more citizens to use PACER as a source of judicial decisions.

On a related note, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts announced yesterday that twelve U.S. federal courts will participate in a pilot project to enhance public access to the judicial decisions on PACER that are available free of charge. The decisions are to be made available through the Government Printing Office (GPO)’s FDsys system. This pilot project is a joint effort between the Judicial Conference of the United States and GPO.

For more on PACER, please see Stephen Schultze’s VoxPopuLII post, PACER, RECAP, and the Movement to Free American Case Law.

HT @evwayne.

Wash on Authentication as a User-Centric Activity

Mike Wash, Chief Information Officer of the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), has posted Authentication Is a User-Centric Activity, on his blog, The WashBoard.

Mr. Wash’s post identifies key issues respecting the authentication of digital government information — including U.S. federal legal information — and discusses GPO’s approach to authentication.

For other recent discussion of authentication of digital legal information, please see Sean McGrath’s post, Pssst…there is no such thing as an authentic/original/official/master electronic legal text, and Jason Eiseman’s VoxPopuLII post, Time to Turn the Page on Print Legal Information.

HT @propylonsean.

Wash Honored by Washington Post & Partnership for Public Service

Mike Wash, CIO of the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), has been honored as “Federal Player of the Week” by The Washington Post and The Partnership for Public Service, with a profile story in The Washington Post.

The article focuses on Mr. Wash’s innovative development of GPO’s FDsys content management system, and his commitment to open government data, including:

• Partnering with Tom Bruce and his team at the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University, and with the Cornell University Law Library, to develop an enhanced, XML-based version of the Code of Federal Regulations;
• Providing free public access to the Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations in bulk XML; and
• Partnering with the Office of the Federal Register to launch the innovative Federal Register 2.0.

In the article, George Beckerman of Marlin & Associates praises Mr. Wash for “providing an ‘absolutely essential and an extremely valuable’ service for Americans. ‘Mike’s work protects these assets, keeps then fresh, and ensures their continued value,’ Beckerman said.”

Congratulations to Mr. Wash on this well-deserved honor!

HT @carlmalamud and @harlanyu.

Document Authentication Workshop at GPO

The transcript and the slides are available for the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO)‘s Document Authentication Workshop, held 18 June 2010, at GPO in Washington, DC, USA.

The workshop addressed many aspects of the authentication of digital legal information. GPO is the official publisher of many important sources of U.S. federal law, including statutes (United States Code, United States Statutes at Large, and Public and Private Laws), reports of the U.S. Supreme Court (United States Reports), and administrative regulations (Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations).

Click here for more information on GPO’s authentication technology.

HT Daniel Bennett.

U.S. GPO Joins Digital Preservation Alliance LOCKSS

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) announced today that it had joined the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) international digital preservation alliance.

LOCKSS utilizes an innovative automated distributed system for preserving digital information.

This announcement is of interest to the legal informatics community because GPO is one of the most important publishers of U.S. federal legal information.

HT SLA Government Information Division blog and Sarah Glassmeyer.

SCOTUS Decisions 1937-1975 Now Available in Bulk from GPO

Full text of U.S. Supreme Court decisions issued from 1937-1975 — derived from the U.S. Air Force’s FLITE database — is available in bulk from the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO)’s FDsys, as of 13 April 2010.

UPDATE: According to GPO, this FLITE file is a text-only file, of approximately 50MB, containing U.S. Supreme Court decisions from 1937 through 1975. The data is not marked up in XML, and there is no user guide accompanying the data. GPO says it does not currently have plans to mark up this data in XML or to chunk the data into smaller components. GPO says it would be interested in partnering with another organization respecting marking up this data in XML and dividing the data into smaller components. Interested organizations should contact GPO’s Office of the Chief Information Officer. [This paragraph added 22 April 2010.]

This information may be of particular interest to those developing legal information systems, and those following the Law.gov legal open government data project.