Proposal

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[The bicameral committee] should have the responsibility to resolve policy issues on the deployment and use of information technology within the Congress. While many issues concerning guidelines and procedures for collaborating and coordinating activities can be worked out by senior staff managers and officials, they are often helped if they know that if they fail there is the option to take the matter to an elected official with the jurisdiction and knowledge to work it out."

The new system will be Congress' primary legislative information system, and should be developed and maintained collaboratively by all the offices and legislative support agencies that serve the Congress. The Library recommends that the system be identified as the legislative information system of the U.S. Congress, not of either chamber alone or of any one support agency. Each office and agency which currently creates, prepares, maintains, prints, or provides access to legislative information should contribute to the system based upon its legislative responsibilities and its areas of expertise. In order to take advantage of the efficiencies inherent in modern technology, it should be a distributed system, enabling it to mirror the distributed organizational responsibilities within the legislative branch.

Because no single entity has responsibility for all legislative information, and because the system will serve both the House and the Senate, the Library recommends, as already proposed by the Committee on House Oversight, the creation of a joint House and Senate legislative systems working group to carry out oversight and coordination responsibilities for the new system. For the remainder of this report, this proposed joint legislative systems working group of Members will be referred to as the Working Group.

The Library suggests that the Working Group be created by the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, that it be chaired by a Member, and that it be composed of Members and officers from both chambers. These committees have lead policy and oversight responsibility for information technology within their respective chambers and should therefore take primary responsibility for formation and operation of the Working Group. The Library suggests that the Working Group also have official representation from the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, the Joint Committee on Printing, the Joint Committee on the Library, the Secretary of the Senate, and the Clerk of the House. Regarding the chairmanship of the Working Group, the Congress may wish to consider having the chair jointly appointed by the Committee on House Oversight and the Committee on Senate Rules and Administration, in consultation with the other participating committees and officers.

3 Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government. Opportunities for the Use of Information Resources and Advanced Technologies in Congress: A Study for the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress. A consultant report prepared by Robert Lee Chartrand and Robert C. Ketcham. New York: The Carnegie Corporation, 1993, p. 48.

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The Working Group would need to be supported by a formally established team consisting of the senior technical managers of the legislative organizations that would be tasked to build and maintain the legislative information system. Many of the issues to be addressed in creating a single system, such as data standards, database architecture, transfer protocols, etc. are very technical in nature and require a high degree of coordination. They cannot be resolved without extensive discussions and consultations among the various entities of the Congress which prepare, distribute, retrieve, display, and print legislative data. This team would provide the technical and management expertise necessary to make informed recommendations and to develop a viable system. They would also be able to bring together staff for subteams that will be needed to analyze various issues and then to develop agreed upon solutions. The Legislative Branch Telecommunications Network team, established several years ago by the Appropriations Committees, is a good example of a group that has worked effectively in the manner envisioned in this plan to improve and support technology that serves the entire Congress. The technical team proposed here will be referred to as the Senior Technical Team.

The Library assumes that no separate funding would be provided for staff to support the Working Group and that the Senior Technical Team would therefore provide such support. The Library believes that this would be an appropriate role for the staff involved because they are people who are already tasked by their organizations to provide legislative information system support to Congress. In this capacity they should be integrally involved in the design and development of a new system.

Finally, while the Working Group should be authorized to make decisions and resolve disagreements among organizations, the Working Group should avoid imposing requirements that would interfere with the ability of any of the contributing organizations to fulfill their other legislative mandates or achieve other elements of their mission. The Senior Technical Team should include staff who could advise the Working Group on the potential impact of the legislative information system requirements, and who could propose alternatives for achieving the goals of the system which were in concert with current operations and business practices.

The tasks of the proposed Working Group will include the following:

A. Establish policies.

B. Ensure user input.

C. Establish technical standards.

D. Set development priorities.

E. Approve implementation plans.

F. Assign responsibilities.

G. Monitor progress.

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H. Make adjustments to the plan and assignments as needed.

I. Resolve disagreements over technology.

In addition, the Library recommends that this report, which discusses the major technical and organizational issues and enumerates several required tasks in the development, maintenance, and operation of a new legislative information system for Congress serve as the Working Group's initial agenda.

Should Congress choose not to create a joint Working Group, it will be more difficult to achieve the goals of the legislation to create a single, integrated system that reduced duplication within the Legislative Branch. Each chamber and each support agency would continue to develop its own system, with a high probability that there would be uncoordinated, wasted effort. Congress could choose to designate one office or support agency to be responsible for coordinating the development of a single system, but it is unlikely that any one office or agency would have sufficient authority to succeed.

USER REQUIREMENTS

One of the first and most important tasks for the Working Group will be to collect, collate, and prioritize user requirements. There have been several efforts undertaken during the past year to gather user requirements, including work carried out by the House Oversight Committee, the Government Printing Office, and the Congressional Research Service. These need to be supplemented by similar efforts to obtain requirements from the groups that have not yet been surveyed. A suggested list follows at the end of this section.

Some of the primary advantages of the tools now available to build retrieval systems are that they allow for rapid prototyping, early production use, and relatively easy modification. These features enable users to work with and evaluate early versions of the system and give developers feedback on suggested improvements. Developers can then make these changes more quickly than was true with older technology, and this cycle can repeat itself as long as is useful. This process, which is sometimes referred to as iterative development, enables developers to build and make systems available while they are still gathering requirements from users. The GPO ACCESS system and the LOC THOMAS system are examples of this type of development cycle.

The user groups whose requirements need to be met by the new system include the following:

1. House and Senate Member offices (including Members, AAs, LDS, LAs, LCs, press secretaries, etc.).

2.

House and Senate committees (including chairs, ranking minority
Members, other Members, staff directors, professional staff, etc.).

4. Legislative Branch support agencies (CRS, CBO, GAO, GPO).

If this system, or portions of it, are made available to the public (see discussion under section entitled OPTIONS FOR PUBLIC ACCESS), the feedback from the following groups should be solicited: individual citizens, libraries and library groups, federal and state governments, affected private and public organizations, and possibly the legislatures of other countries.

DATA STANDARDS

After user requirements, the most important task of the Working Group is the establishment of data standards. The preparation of data is typically the most expensive individual component of an information system. In addition, to obtain the greatest efficiencies and most cost-effective benefits of open architecture systems, it is essential that data exist in standard formats to meet the range of searching, displaying, and printing requirements the new system will have to meet. Also, standard data formats are needed for timely data transfer and exchange, to make it easier to migrate older data to the new technologies that will inevitably emerge, and to help ensure access to historical data. Finally, openly established standards would facilitate the integration of legislative information such as bills and committee reports with data available from commercial sources. It would be productive to seek input from private companies that use and market legislative data produced by Congress. See discussion below under DATA SOURCES: COMMERCIAL AND NONGOVERNMENT.

Various official as well as de facto standards are acceptable. The standard beginning to emerge as the most promising within the Legislative Branch is the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), which is both an official U.S and international standard. GPO is currently playing an important role in establishing SGML as a usable standard for both Legislative and Executive Branch data. Although SGML offers the most flexibility and capability for meeting the requirements of a sophisticated information system, it is also among the most demanding and possibly expensive to implement. New tools are being introduced regularly in the technology market place that promise, over time, to reduce the cost of SGML and make it easier to use, yet it is important not to underestimate the cost of this standard.

Both the Clerk of the House and the Senate Computer Center also have undertaken projects to evaluate and possibly implement SGML. The Congressional Research Service is also evaluating SGML for its reports for Congress, and the GAO has long used a version of SGML to produce its reports.

An early task of the Working Group should be to establish a subteam of representatives from various legislative branch organizations, and possibly commercial users of this data (See discussion below under the heading DATA SOURCES: COMMERCIAL AND NON-GOVERNMENT), to analyze and make

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recommendations regarding data format standards. If the cost-effective implementation of such recommendations requires changes in legislative procedures, the Working Group will need to be advised as early as possible. Also, because it will take time to establish and to implement these recommendations, the subteam will need to make recommendations for interim standards. Finally, the group will need to establish a process for modifying standards on a regular basis as new data and new retrieval requirements emerge.

One of the challenges for the Working Group will be to find cost-effective procedures for coding data according to standard without placing an excessive burden on any one organization. One of the options made possible by a standard such as SGML is that codes could be established for a variety of data elements, such as bill number, speaker name, subject, etc., and for a wide range of functions, such as printing, data display, retrieval, etc. The resulting groups of codes, sometimes referred to as a "common tag set", could be used by all Legislative Branch agencies for tagging the data for the functions with which they are most concerned. Agencies might then collaborate on tagging some of the data, and thereby share the cost and eliminate duplication in this expensive process. It will still be necessary, however, for one organization to be responsible for the technical maintenance of a shared tag set and its associated formats and standards.

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.

4SGML is currently the most sophisticated data standard available for the purposes of the legislative information system. Other standards that are in wide use and could continue to serve on an interim basis include ASCII and HTML.