For the last 8 months, engineers and content matter experts have been busy planning for the migration of the Congressional suite of products to the ProQuest platform. This is a gargantuan task, encompassing a myriad of entitlements, separate products, and different "flavors" of many different document types, from the US Code to Hearings, to the publications and maps published within the U.S. Congressional Serial Set.
As of now, ProQuest has loaded roughly 9 million (out of approximately 12 million) documents into the new Content Store, has nearly completed the user interface wireframe prototypes, and has the MarkLogic search engine running queries and retrieving accurate results in a development environment. Although we have made a great start, there is still much to do in order to make our June 2012 release deadline.
The present plan calls for the launch of the new ProQuest Congressional in June 2012 so that librarians and users can familiarize themselves with the new interface before students arrive for the fall semester. We are planning to have both the present LexisNexis and the new ProQuest versions run in parallel for a short amount of time, with a final cutover slated for the Fall of 2012.
What users will see will be different, but recognizable. There will be Basic, Advanced, and Search by Number (bibliographic) search forms. Users will have access to all the documents and content they presently have within the core product, but there will be a few coverage changes for certain licensed materials like the Washington Post in the Political News section. On the LexisNexis platform users currently have access to only Section A of the Post from 1977 to the present, but on the ProQuest platform, users will have access to the ENTIRE Washington Post content from 1987 to the present.
Some things will stay the same, but there will also be great improvements!
· Search Facets: the most striking difference to the search results will be “facets” that will allow the user to limit and winnow their search result by document type, legislative chamber, subject and geographic term, committee, witness affiliation, and personal name.
· If PDFs are available, they will be accessible via the results page…not just from the full document view.
· The Congressional Record will be fully integrated with all other content and will be searchable from within the Advanced, Basic, and Search by Number forms.
· Basic, Advanced, and Search by Number forms will allow for the searching of bills, bill tracking, Statutes at Large, and other document types currently segregated to the separate Legislative Histories, Bills & Laws search forms.
· The Search by Number form will have ALL citation search elements on one page. This means no more task dropdowns to search 3 different ways for content related to a given bill number, for example.
· The default date selection will be “all available dates” instead of the often complained of “In the last 2 years”.
· Creation of two new "composite" document types: Bill Profile and Member Profile.
o These two composite documents will serve as the one place to find all data within PQ Congressional related to a given bill or legislator.
o Bill Profile will allow the user direct access to all the different versions of the bill text, all floor votes, all publications related to that bill, and related legislation
o Member Profile will give users access to the biographical information, sponsored bills, floor statements, floor votes, campaign finance information, and committee assignments not only for the current Congress, but for previous Congresses as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment