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displaying text, others may be optimized for searching and displaying video. Similarly, some systems may have advantages for novice users, others for expert searchers. Because the legislative information system will have to accommodate data from a variety of sources, the system would have to accommodate the needs of staff who might be using a variety of search engines. The Library recommends that the Working Group form a subteam to address issues related to the integration of search engines, to continually assess the state-of-the-art in this technical field, and to regularly evaluate the effectiveness of the search engines used in Congress' legislative information system.

USER INTERFACE(S)

The user interface is designed with software that enables the user to learn what is available in the system, formulate specific requests for information, receive and display the results of a search, and perform other tasks, such as storing the retrieved data, sorting it, sending it to someone else, and incorporating it into another document. With the advent of the graphical user interface (GUI), there have been tremendous improvements in interface software which have made it much easier to understand and use systems, and enable many more tasks to be performed.

A well designed graphical user interface is a critical element of the legislative information system because it will allow staff to find information without having to know where it is stored or what search commands to use. For example, the interface would enable the user to request the official electronic version of the bill as it passed the House, which might be stored at GPO, and the schedule for the markup on that bill in a Senate committee, which might be stored on a committee server. The user would not have to know how to request that data technically, nor know where it was stored. The interface would take care of these tasks.

Interfaces can also be customized to meet the needs of different types of users (expert, novice, congressional, public, etc.) at a relatively small cost compared with alternatives such as building a different system to meet the needs of various users. A building metaphor may help to illustrate this point. The collection and preparation of data, and the design of a search engine can be compared to the foundation, walls, roof, plumbing, and wiring of a house. The user interface is analogous to the windows of that house, both in terms of its cost relative to the rest of the house, and in the sense that it allows different views into the data that resides in the house. This flexibility of interface software is an important asset because of the range of user needs. For example, the staff of the House and Senate bill status offices are expert users of legislative retrieval systems and have different requirements from the newly arrived legislative correspondent or the professional staff member on the committee.

Another advantage of the flexibility and power of user interface software is that it can manage access to licensed information. For example, if the House and Senate continue to license information from commercial sources under

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contractual arrangements, it might be possible to integrate this data effectively with the data in the legislative information system through the design of the interface linked with the necessary security systems, and still remain within the requirements of the contractual obligations. There are a variety of options for accomplishing this, depending upon the flexibility of the vendor systems and the interests of the commercial providers. (See previous discussion under DATA SOURCES: COMMERCIAL AND NON-GOVERNMENT)

The power and flexibility of interface software can pose certain challenges. There are a variety of commercial providers of this type of software, and it can be customized by the user as well as by the designers of the legislative information system. The Working Group would need to establish some guidelines regarding the compatibility requirements of the software that offices could select to access the system. Absent such guidelines, the costs to develop and support all the possible software choices could be quite expensive.

The Library recommends that the Working Group form a subteam to design user interfaces(s), taking into account the needs of different users and the variety of data formats. The projected rate of technical enhancements in user interface software, the changing requirements of users, and the growth in the amount and kinds of data available on the system will require that the subteam make adjustments and improvements in the user interface(s) on an ongoing basis. The user interface should encourage and enable user to send suggestions for system improvements to the Working Group.

USER TRAINING, DOCUMENTATION, AND SUPPORT

documentation, and

Like most organizations in this dramatic improvements in the

Adequate user support through training, troubleshooting is an essential requirement. country, Congress is a beneficiary of the sophistication and in the ease of use computer technology that have occurred in the last five years. However, as this technology has become more widely used and as it is applied to larger number of critical business operations, maintaining ease of use has become more challenging.

The Library recommends that the design and support of the legislative information system follow these principles:

1. Design the system so that required training time can be kept to an absolute minimum.

2. Provide multiple ways for users to obtain the required training, including training classes, online help, printed documentation, self teaching programs, and audio and video instruction programs.

3. Through the Working Group, coordinate the work needed to provide user support, based upon the current programs and expertise of each of the organizations within the Legislative Branch. For example, the House Information Resources, the Senate Computer Center, GPO, and the Library each

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provide training programs for their congressional clients. It might prove most cost-effective to divide and coordinate responsibility for introductory and advanced courses and for documentation among these organizations.

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.

RETIREMENT OF LEGACY SYSTEMS

The retirement of the systems that currently provide Congress with legislative information presents all of the challenges that arise whenever there is a proposal to replace an older system (or so called "legacy system") with a newer system. Despite their shortcomings, the Library's SCORPIO system, the House MIN and ISIS systems, and the Senate LEGIS system work every day for hundreds of staff on Capitol Hill and in district and state offices.

The basic principle should be that the current systems can be retired when the new system provides comparable functionality. The difficulty in applying this principle arises when one tries to specify exactly when comparable functionality has been achieved. Despite the fact that new technology provides many advantages over the older systems (e.g., the graphical user interfaces make them easier to understand, the user can "click" and link immediately to related information, such as the text of the debate in the Record cited in the status section of the bill), the older systems have been developed and fine tuned for over 20 years, and they have a number of features that are not yet available in the newer technology.

Here are two generic examples:

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Systems operating on the World Wide Web cannot yet combine the results of previous searches with the results of later searches. There are ways to get around this problem, but the optimal and comparable solution is not yet clear.

Many expert users prefer to type in the specific system command rather than go through a series of "dialog boxes" because it is faster and more efficient for them. Most new systems permit this in limited and/or complex ways.

Here are two examples specific to individual systems:

The Library of Congress SCORPIO system allows congressional staff to request books located through its online card catalog through the ORDER command.

The House MIN system allows users to search for and read a summary of floor proceedings within minutes of their occurrence.

In the case of both of these specific examples, it will be possible to develop these capabilities in the new system, but it will take time and resources to accomplish the task. The new technology does not come already equipped with these customized features that have been developed over the years.

The older data accessible through these systems present an additional challenge. The data from the 104th Congress will certainly be accessible. However, the digests of the bills back through the 93rd Congress may not be transferrable to the new technology, although it will probably be possible to provide some limited means of access. While the older data is not searched as frequently as that of the current Congress, its availability, however infrequently needed, is still important to many staff. As one example, committees often ask CRS for information about historical trends in legislative activities. These questions can only be answered at a reasonable cost by accessing the older data in the current House, Senate, or Library legislative systems.

It is important to understand the significance of this problem without overdramatizing it. While nearly all of the data in the current systems exists in some print version, much of the value and accessibility of the data exists only through its availability in an online retrieval system. In this context, the definition of comparable functionality becomes a matter of judgment tempered by the issue of cost. At this point, it will require more analysis in order to make a recommendation about how to handle older data. Solution(s) to this problem will affect the decision about when comparable functionality has been achieved.

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PRESERVATION AND LONG TERM ACCESS

The issues of preservation and long term access will be important for the new legislative information system. Much of the data in that system may exist only in digital format, and the question of how to ensure the preservation and long term access to the data in the new legislative information system must be answered before it is necessary to move on to the generation of technology beyond today's. Except for the problem of acid based paper, the invention of the printed book provided a solution to this problem for over 500 years. The current online systems have been in operation for less than 25 years and we now face the problem. Fortunately the advances in technology and the development of data standards such as SGML offer potential solutions to this problem in the future, but only if they are purposefully and effectively implemented from the beginning.

Because of the important role legislative histories play in the interpretation of Federal laws and regulations, the Working Group's design for a new legislative information system must plan for both the permanent archiving of core legislative data and its long-term accessibility. Legislative history, at whatever level of detail recorded, constitutes the framework from within which future legislative, judicial and executive actions will be taken, whether these are in the form of new legislation and amendments, court decisions, or agency rulemaking. For this reason, practically all legislative data collected must be indefinitely retained and constantly available.

An indefinite period of retention has the added benefit of meeting scholarly and public interest in the legislative process. Historical data can migrate to appropriate agencies with archival responsibility at a designated time and still have the potential to be integrated at the user interface level within the distributed computing environment that constitutes the legislative information system infrastructure. For purposes of security and reliability, certain data sets, particularly those in heavy demand, may be 'mirrored' or copied to more than one site.

OPTIONS FOR PUBLIC ACCESS

PL104-53 directed the Library to examine issues regarding efficient ways to make legislative information available to the public and to submit its analysis to the committees for their consideration and possible action. The Library interprets this issue to center on the question of access to the public without charge. There are, as noted above, a number of commercial providers who make legislative information available to the public for a fee. Also as noted above, the proposals in this plan, if implemented, would improve the quality, accuracy, and timeliness of core congressional legislative information available to the public through these commercial sources. The GPO ACCESS system and the LOC THOMAS system, on the other hand, are examples of congressional mandates to make legislative information accessible to the public without direct charge. The remainder of this discussion will focus on the issue of free access to the public.