New regulation part checklist

Purpose: This is a step-by-step guide for SMEs and other team members who need to add a new regulation part to eRegs.

Prepare for adding the new part

• Consult the team to check for potential technical issues before importing a new part - we may want to try it in a dev environment first. Most are fine, but for example, 45 CFR 75 has an unusual structure with many appendixes, so we'd need to write some new code to enable the website to display that part's table of contents.

• In our existing database of public and internal resources, look for items relevant to the new part and ensure they are tagged with those regulation sections or subparts. This step means that when the new part becomes visible, it'll immediately show relevant resources in its sidebars. (If you can't find the regulation citations in the database, you can do the "Upload locations" configuration below, without importing the reg text.)

• Refer to our criteria doc. To fulfill our goals, you may need to research and add more resources, such as additional public links. Doing this before the import means that the new part shows up with useful resources, but you can always add more items after the import as well.

Configure the import

To import a new part, use the parser configuration page in the admin panel. It has three checkboxes, and you can choose which one you want at this time (or all three):

• Upload reg text. This means import the text of the regulation and make it show up to readers as a new part.
• Upload locations. This means import the full list of sections and subparts in that part, so that we can tag items to the locations in that part. No visible user impact. (See Population of regulation citations.)
• Upload FR docs. This means import the Federal Register rules that changed (or proposed to change) sections in that part. This FR database has rules back to approximately the early 2000s, with limited information between 1996 and 2000.

Our system checks for new content overnight, so you can expect to see the new information the next day.

After uploading locations and FR docs, check in the admin panel under "Sections" to see if there are any locations in the part that aren't assigned to a subpart. This can happen for old sections that no longer exist but are associated with a FR rule or other type of resource. To get those rules to show up in the sidebar for the relevant subpart, manually assign those sections to the relevant subparts. (If you're not sure which subpart, click a rule in that section's "linked resources" list and see what it said.)

Automated content

Let's say you just checked all three checkboxes. These things should happen overnight:

• The text of the part becomes visible and searchable. You can access it from the homepage Table of Contents and the "jump to".
  • Like all existing parts, from now on, every night our system will check for updates to the regulation text and automatically import them.
• All subparts and sections in that part become available as regulation locations in the admin panel (if they weren't already in there).
• Any items in our database (such as public links and FR docs) that are already tagged to sections in that part will show up in the part sidebars.
  • We automatically import any other Federal Register rules that changed (or proposed to change) sections in that part.
  • When you add (or import) a new FR doc, we automatically index the new document (if possible).
• Within the regulation text, any citations to existing SSA sections in our database will become clickable links. For a quick way to check which SSA sections are in our database, look at our Statutes page.
  • If you want to import a new SSA section, see these instructions. In short, you go to the "Statute Link Converter" panel and click "Import Conversions".
• Within the regulation text, any citations in the format "XX U.S.C. YYY" or "XX CFR YYY" also become clickable links.
  • We also want to automatically convert other types of regulation citations into clickable links, but it's not the highest priority right now.

Quality assurance

Regulations

• Click through all the new subparts. Do they seem to work normally? Great! If you get an unexpected error, tell the team.

Federal Register links

• Review and refine the new auto-imported Federal Register rules. You can find them as the newest items on our FR Documents page in the admin panel.
  • Add subjects to the new documents.
  • For any corrections or withdrawals, check the relevant checkboxes - this marking doesn't happen automatically.
  • Correct any data entry errors. Sometimes older docs have incomplete data in the FR database.
  • Check the automated grouping (background info: Federal Register link grouping). Do you need to update a rule's metadata to make it part of a group of related documents? You can also check by going to the new subparts and looking at their sidebars to find any groupings that look too broad, or ungrouped documents that should be grouped.
• The FR API only has data back to about 1994. Is this regulation part older than approximately 2000? If yes, somebody needs to research and add in all relevant older FR rules and NPRMs.
  • If any 1990s rules are imported, check them and fill in any missing metadata. May need to do this for the early 2000s rules as well.
  • You can add more older rules but clicking section footer links to Final Rules and ensuring that we have those docs in our sidebars, along with their NPRMs (a Final Rule will mention any associated NPRMs in its preamble).
  • Not all sections have those links though. You just have to use your subject matter expertise to find additional rules that are relevant. For example, we found this article with an appendix that lists Medicaid-related rules published between 1981 and 1990, and this index of HHS rules and regulations.

Statute citations

• Check the automated statute citation links within the regulation text. If the text contains a citation that is outdated or contains a clerical error, clicking the link will give the user an error message. We can prevent those citations from becoming links by using the "Change Statute Link Configuration" panel and adding new exceptions.

Next steps

From here, it's up to us and our understanding of user needs. If we need to add new items, new categories, etc., go ahead!