Every month the Internet For Lawyers' free Internet legal research newsletter delivers this kind of useful information to your e-mail inbox.

Buried deep within the Government Printing Office's (GPO) biennial report to Congress - posted on its Access web portal - is a look into the possible future of the site. Under the heading "Future Outlook," the report includes a section entitled "Upcoming Applications" that outlines a number of ambitious extensions of the functionality of GPO Access and promises to make even more information readily available to site visitors.

 

Quoting form the report, they are:

 

Statutes at Large

GPO Access is currently working on creating a new Statues at Large application. The addition of this application will further enhance GPO Access users' ability to track a bill throughout the legislative process.

 

Browseable Congressional Hearings

In the near future, GPO Access also hopes to add a browseable list of all Congressional Hearings. A browseable list will provide an alternative to the current Congressional Hearings database that utilizes a search function to retrieve documents.

 

E-CFR

GPO is working with the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration to provide an Electronic Code of Federal Regulations Application (e-CFR), that will be updated daily as opposed to the current annual update of theCode of Federal Regulations Application. The e-CFR will consist of two linked databases: the "current Code" and "amendment files." The current Code database will be updated according to the effective dates of amendments published in the Federal Register. As amendments become effective, the changes will be integrated into the current Code database to display the full text of the currently updated CFR. For future-effective amendments, hypertext links will be inserted into the affected sections or parts of the current Code to take users to the pertinent amendment files. Currently, a beta test site of the e-CFR is available via GPO Access.