diff --git a/DESCRIPTION b/DESCRIPTION
index 2084b61..fbaad12 100644
--- a/DESCRIPTION
+++ b/DESCRIPTION
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ Description: A programmatic interface to many species occurrence data sources,
     eBird, AntWeb, and more as they sources become easily available.
 Version: 0.1.2
 License: MIT + file LICENSE
-Date: 2014-04-22
+Date: 2014-05-01
 Authors@R: c(person("Scott", "Chamberlain", role = c("aut", "cre"),
     email = "myrmecocystus@gmail.com"),
     person("Karthik", "Ram", role = "aut",
diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 067145b..a843a1d 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -8,6 +8,12 @@ NEW FEATURES
 * New function `fixnames()` to trim species names with optional input parameters to make data easier to use for mapping.
 * New function `wkt_vis()` to visualize a WKT (well-known text) area on a map. Uses `ggmap` to pull down a Google map so that the visualization has some geographic and natural earth context. We'll soon introduce an interactive version of this function that will bring up a small Shiny app to draw a WKT area, then return those coordinates to your R session. (#34)
 
+IMPROVEMENTS
+
+* Added a CONTRIBUTING.md file to the github repo to help guide contributions (#61)
+* Packages that require a certain version are forced to be X version or greater. Thes are rinat (>= 0.1.1), rbison (>= 0.3.2), rgbif (>= 0.6.2), ecoengine (>= 1.3), rebird (>= 0.1.1), AntWeb (>= 0.6.1), and leafletR (>= 0.2-0). This should help avoid problems.
+* General improvement to function documentation. 
+
 spocc 0.1.0
 ===============