LII: Under the Hood
A bit over a year ago, we released the first iteration of our new version of the eCFR , the Office of the Federal Register’s unofficial compilation of the current text of the Code of Federal Regulations. At the time, we’d been using the text of the official print version of the CFR to generate our electronic version – it was based on GPO’s authenticated copy of the text, but it was woefully out of date because titles are prepared for printing only once a year. During the past year, while retrofitting and improving features like indentation , cross references, and definitions , we maintained the print-CFR in parallel so that readers could, if they chose, refer to the outdated-but-based-on-official-print version.
This week we’re discontinuing the print-CFR. The reason? Updates. As agencies engage in rulemaking activity, they amend, revise, add, and remove sections, subparts, parts, and appendices. During the past year, the Office of the Federal Register has published thousands of such changes to the eCFR. These changes will eventually make their way into the annual print edition of the CFR, but most of the time, the newest rules making the headlines are, at best, many months away from reaching print.
What’s new? Well, among those thousands of changes were a number of places where agencies were adding rules reflecting new electronic workflows. And these additions provide us with an occasion for checking every facet of our own electronic workflows. When the Citizenship and Immigration Service added the Electronic Visa Update System, they collected the existing sections in Part 215 of Title 8 of the CFR into a new Subpart A and added sections 215.21-215.24 under the new Subpart B . So, after adding the new sections, the software had to refresh the table of contents for Part 215 and create the table of contents for 8 CFR Part 215 Subpart A.
What you’ll see doesn’t look a whole lot different from what’s been there for the past year, but it will be a lot easier to find new CFR sections, the pages will load more quickly, and we will be able to release new CFR features more quickly.
