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procedures 3) develop all the required capabilities in the new retrieval system and 4) provide adequate security.

Nevertheless, the nature of technology in use within the House and Senate and the support agencies allows for an iterative development cycle that permits the release of new features and files as soon as they are available. This means that congressional staff will be able to use each new capability as early as possible, assuming they have a workstation that will support the system, without having to wait for the entire plan to be complete.

Estimated Costs and Staffing. At this stage of planning for the legislative information system, it is difficult to project costs with any precision. The full scope of this effort first has to be approved or further defined by the committees. The Working Group, supported by the Senior Technical Team, will then have to develop the plan in more detail with time frames for the various phases agreed upon. This effort will obviously be multi-phased over several years.

The staff resources available to all of the Legislative Branch organizations that will be tasked to build this system are a critical issue. For this plan, the Library has assumed that the system will have to be built within existing resources approved by Congress, and that the time frame for completion of specific elements of the system will therefore have to be adjusted based upon available staff and financial resources. Also, participating organizations must be able to manage their resources so that they can fulfill their other mandated and priority mission functions.

It will be a significant challenge to build the proposed legislative information system with existing, and probably declining resources, especially because the demand for staff with the technical skills needed to build the new legislative information system for Congress has become highly competitive.

Next Steps. It is important to begin the process of coordinating the separate system initiatives under way within the Legislative Branch as soon as possible. Otherwise, this rare opportunity for creating an integrated and collaborative system will be lost. The committees may well wish to obtain additional comments on this plan from other offices and agencies of the legislature and from commercial vendors through an invitation for comment or through a hearing. Once this process is completed, the Library recommends that the committees determine whether they wish to approve and implement this plan in its current or in a modified form by the end of the current fiscal year.

A PLAN FOR A NEW LEGISLATIVE INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS

INTRODUCTION

Public Law 104-53 (H.R. 2492), section 209, directed the Library of Congress to develop a plan for the creation of a single legislative information system to serve the entire Congress. The law directs that the plan be approved by the Committee on Rules and Administration of the Senate, the Committee on House Oversight of the House of Representatives, and the Committees on Appropriations of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Upon approval of the plan, the Library of Congress, or the entity designated by the plan, shall develop and maintain the system, in coordination with other appropriate entities of the legislative branch.

The law directs the Library to take into consideration the findings and recommendations of the Library's earlier study, required by House Report No. 103-517, to identify and eliminate redundancies in congressional information systems. The law also requires that the Library examine issues regarding efficient ways to make legislative information available to the public and submit its analysis to the committees for their consideration and possible action.

The Conference Report (H.Rept. 104-212) that accompanied H.R. 2492 directed the Library to include in its analysis and plan an evaluation of commercial sources of legislative information as well as the various databases and data creation, processing, and distribution systems extant in the legislative branch. This report constitutes the required plan and is submitted by the Library in accordance with the directives contained in Public Law 104-53.

In July 1995, the Library of Congress completed a study of duplication among legislative information systems supported by the Congress.' This study documented the extent of overlap which has developed since the 1970s both among the systems designed for the collection and preparation of legislative data and among the systems designed for the retrieval, display, and printing of this information. The study found that while there have been steps taken to reduce duplication in the creation and preparation of data, there are still significant opportunities for reducing this overlap further and making the process even more efficient. With respect to systems for retrieval and display, the report found that, on balance, duplication has been increasing. Despite Senate proposals to eliminate its retrieval system and rely on the Library, overlap had increased because of the creation within the last two years of systems that contain common legislative information, including the GPO ACCESS system, the LOC THOMAS system, and the House gopher and Web servers.

SYSTEMS:

'DUPLICATION AMONG LEGISLATIVE TRACKING FINDINGS, A Report Prepared by the Library of Congress for the House and Senate Appropriations Committees Pursuant to House Report 103-517 and House Report 104-141, July 14, 1995.

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Recent improvements in technology, coupled with the need to replace aging legacy systems, have led to independent efforts in the House, Senate, and GPO to improve their systems for data collection and preparation. This same combination of aging systems and recent technical advances has also affected the development of retrieval systems; the Library, the GPO, and the House are each rebuilding or improving their existing search and display systems.

The fact that these new development programs are under way now offers an excellent opportunity to reduce duplication and to increase the amount of coordination that should exist among systems that are so highly interdependent. One of the primary recommendations of this plan, which will be underscored in other contexts, is that the committees should act soon to ensure that these separate initiatives are purposefully integrated both to reduce duplication of effort and to improve the quality and compatibility of the systems being developed. Absent such a directive, the design and development of these systems will proceed quite separately, with the result that in a relatively short time (probably by the start of the next Congress), they will be much more difficult and costly to integrate.

The Library suggests that the plan contained in this report, after it has been reviewed and modified as necessary by the committees, can offer an effective means to achieve this coordination, particularly by the establishment of a bicameral working group on a new legislative information system (see discussion below). The Library further suggests that this plan, as approved, can provide the basis for the guidelines and agenda for the proposed working group.

The section that follows describes the major programs under way within the legislative branch to create and provide access to legislative information; it also updates the information contained in the Library's duplication study submitted in July 1995.

BACKGROUND

GPO ACCESS System. The 103d Congress passed Public Law 103-40, which directed the Government Printing Office (GPO) to make Legislative Branch and Executive Branch information, beginning with the Congressional Record and the Federal Register, available via online systems. In response to this mandate, GPO developed its ACCESS system, which was first released to depository libraries and the public in June 1994. This legislation authorizes the Superintendent of Documents to determine what other publications distributed by that office will be made available on the system. With respect to legislative information, ACCESS currently includes, among other documents, the full text of bills and the Congressional Record for the 103d and 104th Congresses, the Congressional Record Index (since 1983), the House and Senate Calendars, committee reports for the 104th, the History of Bills since 1983, the 1994/5 Unified Agenda, and the U.S. Code. In December 1995, the Public Printer eliminated all charges for use of the ACCESS system. GPO plans to replace the current ACCESS software with a more sophisticated commercial retrieval system during the first half of calendar 1996. GPO has also developed plans for making

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many Executive Branch agency publications available through the ACCESS system. In response to a congressional directive, GPO is developing a plan, which will be subject to congressional approval, for making the Depository Library Program entirely electronic (except for core publications which will also be available in print) by 1998.

LOC THOMAS System. In December 1994, Speaker-elect Gingrich and Chairman-elect Thomas directed the Library of Congress to develop a system for making legislative information available to the public through the Internet.2 In his speech at the inauguration of the THOMAS system the Speaker stated that his intention was to ensure that the public has direct, immediate, and free access to legislative information. In January 1995, the Library released to Congress and the public its THOMAS system, which currently includes the full text of the bills and the Congressional Record for the 103d and 104th Congresses (received from the GPO), and the CRS-prepared bill digest database, which contains information on sponsors and cosponsors; committee, floor, conference, and executive actions; amendments; and summaries of all bills. In response to guidelines established by the House Oversight Committee, and in response to requests from the JCP, the Library is also working to make other legislative information available on THOMAS, including committee reports (projected availability in February 1996), House and Senate procedural rules, etc. The House Oversight Committee has approved specific guidelines for the legislative information that it wishes to be made available on THOMAS, but the Senate has not yet provided its guidelines to the Library.

Senate Initiatives. In February, 1995, staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee asked the Library of Congress to analyze and, if feasible, to develop the means for providing legislative information retrieval services for the Senate in place of its current Senate Legis system. The Library has been working with the Senate Computer Center to develop a plan for implementing this request. The plan currently calls for the Senate Computer Center to continue to pass its legislative information to the Library, and to begin sending its Treaties, Nominations, and Executive Communications files to the Library on a regular production basis. The Library makes its legislative files available to Senate offices now, and will make the Treaties, Nominations, and Executive Communication files available via its SCORPIO retrieval system as early in 1996 as possible. This task is made relatively straight forward because the Senate Legis system and the Library's SCORPIO system are derived from the same software system. When the Library completes the planned replacement of its SCORPIO system, all Senate files would be migrated to the new system.

This plan, if approved by the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, would enable the Senate Computer Center to focus its efforts on the replacement of its current data collection system, which supports the Secretary

"The Library automated the production of its bill digest files in 1969, made them available in the Library's public reading rooms in 1975, and, with the approval of the Joint Committee on the Library, made them more broadly available to the public through national communications networks in 1990.

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