Test to Assign Congress.gov Public Policy Areas Terms in GPO Records for Congressional Publications

Starting on Monday, October 17, 2022, the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) will launch a three-month test to assign terms from the Congressional Research Service’s (CRS’s) Congress.gov Policy Areas terms list, which are used for bills and resolutions on Congress.gov in records for Congressional publications. The CRS and GPO’s Library Technical Services worked together on submitting the request for a new MARC Subject Heading and Term Source Code for the Congress.gov list to the Library of Congress, and the new code was issued in August. We want to express our sincere appreciation to the CRS staff members for their great collaboration.

The code will indicate the provenance of this metadata in GPO’s records. The terms will provide a higher-level facet to enhance the discoverability of our records and the identification of publications. In general, we will apply one term per record, and we will enter the terms in MARC 650 fields with the source code in subfield 2. After the test, we will analyze the results and determine our next steps. Our goal is to enhance our records with this new metadata element that will reflect a key characteristic of Government documents.

Please submit your feedback and questions via askGPO in the “Cataloging/Metadata (Policy and Records)” category.