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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." (See sample, Appendix B.) 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. 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. (See examples, Appendix C.)

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

'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.

"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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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.

DATA SOURCES: GOVERNMENT

After the matters of data standards and data coordination are resolved, the next most important set of issues are the questions of what data to include in the system and in what order of priority. To create informed public policy, lawmakers require access to a wide range of current and historical information, including existing statutes, support agency analyses, academic studies, court

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decisions, budget and financial data, regulations, executive branch policies, public and private sector analyses, lobby group position papers, and newspaper reports from local, national, and international sources. They also need immediate access to official records, publications, and documents from the current and from previous Congresses. Finally, after policies have been agreed upon and laws have been passed, they need information about the effects of these decisions on the domestic and international affairs of this country. For a legislative information system to serve the Congress well, it must be able to acquire and provide this broad range of information to Congress on a timely basis, in formats that are understandable, and in ways that support the legislative decision making process both now and in the future.

In addition, much of the information that lawmakers require has to be available to them before it becomes a formal publication. For example, actions on pending legislation are recorded in a variety of printed sources, but it is important for Members and staff to have the status of bills as soon as possible, often before it is printed. Similarly, Members need the text of amendments before it is available in official publications. An example of a new information source of increasing value is the video record of floor proceedings. Through cable television, Members can see floor actions as they occur, but they have no means for recalling and reviewing such data on a timely basis. New technology, likely to be available on a production basis within the next 12-24 months, could be incorporated into the legislative information system to make this possible.

To best serve the needs of Members, therefore, a new legislative information system has to be broadly conceived and must include information in a variety of formats, including text, data, audio, and video available from a wide range of sources on a timely basis.

The discussions that follow in this section (DATA SOURCES: GOVERNMENT INFORMATION) and in the next section (COMMERCIAL AND OTHER NON-GOVERNMENT) identify the categories of information that the Library recommends for inclusion in the system. These lists will need to be modified as more users have an opportunity to comment on them. Because everything cannot be brought online at the same time, the Working Group will need to establish a more specific ordering. Although this should probably be based on the assumption that data currently available to Congress in one of its existing systems should be incorporated into the new system first, the Working Group may want to make modifications based upon user feedback and a determination of more pressing requirements.

Congressional Information

Bille

The system should include all published versions of all bills, including both the official full text version prepared by the GPO and the annotated version by the Library, with links to support agency publications and the most current version of the U.S. Code. The Office of the Legislative Counsel of both the House and the Senate play a critical role in the preparation of a large majority

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of the bills introduced each year. These Offices are already working with GPO on the preparation and tagging of bill text, and it would be useful to explore the possibility of the Legislative Counsels coordinating with the Working Group to support the timeliness, accuracy, and utility of the new legislative information system.

Bill Amendments

A new legislative information system for Congress can provide the opportunity to improve the availability of information on both floor and committee amendments. If adequate data tagging standards can be developed and implemented for both bills and amendments, display technology could enable users to view more complete information about the content and status of a given amendment by itself, as well as see how the bill would read if the amendment were approved. Achieving these improvements may require some procedural changes in the way amendments are handled in the House, such as establishing a formal numbering system. Such changes, however, would provide considerable benefit to Members and staff in locating and displaying information about amendments. See Appendix D for a more detailed discussion about ways to improve access to amendments.

Status of Bills

Timeliness, accuracy, and detail are critical criteria for this data. Several years ago, House Information Resources pioneered a method for providing a summary of House floor proceedings within 10-15 minutes of the actual event. Today's technology offers the potential for linking data that is this timely to the bill or amendment itself so that users can have very current status information. The importance of accuracy dictates that the Clerk of the House and Secretary of the Senate be the source of these data for floor actions and that they have the tools to enter and correct data as quickly as possible. Sufficient detail is important both because of the need to understand what happened (e.g., was it a voice or recorded vote, what was the recorded vote number, where in the Record can the debate be found, etc.) and because of the number of questions that the leadership, committees, and members ask about workload and about actions (e.g., how many times did the House vote to suspend the rules). Currently, the House, Senate, and the Library each collect some status steps, some of which are overlapping, others of which do not contain sufficient information. The Library recommends that a subteam of the Working Group address this overlap and develop procedures for collecting status information as efficiently as possible while meeting the criteria of timeliness, accuracy, and detail.

The status of legislation within committees poses a special challenge. Knowing both what has happened to a bill in committee and also what is scheduled to happen is an important need of Members, staff and support agencies. Committees, on the other hand are deluged with work, and while they are the authoritative source of these data, they need tools that enable them to collect, prepare, and distribute this information quickly and easily. Ideally, committees should be able to create and disseminate status and schedule

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information as a natural by-product of work they must do for themselves. A number of commercial companies have been able to develop a profitable business in part from having employees in the field to collect such information from the committees. While this is beneficial to many, it means that congressional offices that need this information, which Congress itself creates, have to pay for it.

The Library recommends that the proposed subteam on status address ways to acquire both floor and committee actions, scheduled as well as completed actions, on a more timely basis. This will require an analysis of the cost of purchasing this information from commercial vendors compared to the cost of developing and maintaining a system or systems that help committees provide this information themselves, with minimum impact on committee staff time. House Information Resources has an initiative under way now to examine this issue, and the Senate Rules Committee is considering a similar project.

Congressional Record

Over time, the Congressional Record has come to serve many important functions for the Congress. It is a record of debate, a schedule of activities, a forum for the publication of ideas, a means of recognizing achievements, a method of communicating with constituents, a system for recording official business, and a widely accessible medium of communication about the activities of Congress. As a consequence it is both vital and costly. The GPO has had to be highly creative and effective in developing systems to meet Congress' requirements for the Congressional Record. Nevertheless, as Congress addresses the need to reduce its own costs, one of the issues it may wish to consider is whether there are other, less costly, yet equally effective means of meeting the multiple objectives of the Record. The improving state of electronic publication, and the increased availability and value of video data, combined with efforts to create and collect data more efficiently may allow for such opportunities. The Library recommends that a subteam of the Working Group be established to determine the feasibility of this proposal.

Committee Publications

Timeliness, accuracy, and accessibility are the important criteria for committee publications, which include hearings, reports (from both individual and conference committees), prints and documents. Hearings can be further delineated to include submitted testimony, and both unedited and edited transcripts of testimony. Also, testimony can be recorded and distributed in print and, increasingly, in audio and video media. There is an understandable tension between committees, which, with decreasing staff resources, are responsible for the cost and accuracy of these publications, and those outside of committees, including Member offices, support agencies, and the public, who always want immediate access to these publications. This is another area in which private firms are developing businesses from the demand for these publications, even though the documents they produce are unofficial.

Technology cannot provide a simple answer to the conflicting pressures that surround committee publications. It is reasonable, however, to include within