As we sit down to type these notes, we are conscious it has, once again, been a little while. We are also conscious that this issue may well end up a little shorter than some of our previous efforts. Which may result in a sigh of relief from our dear reader - hi Keith.
Our excuses are threefold: firstly, Easter weekend. Secondly, Librarians Anya and Phil, together with resident computational ‘experts’ in tow, took a city break in Glasgow. More on which later. Thirdly, and in between those two points of pleasure, ‘Agile Quarterly Planning’ closed in upon us, soaking up two whole days for both librarians and their computational colleagues. As ever, our real problem is finding people to do the work we planned last time round. Still, it was delightful to see everyone, especially our two resident Yorkists - Shedcode James and Developer Jon - who trekked from the capital of South Yorkshire, to the capital of the home counties. To mark the occasion, a line-up photo was arranged. If you know of a Rails development team who are shorter in stature, please do get in touch.
Planning seemed to go well, being mostly the things we didn’t get time to do last time around. We were told our value chain mapping experiments helped enormously, although that may have just been a ploy to stop Michael from whining.
In terms of changes at the top of our assorted value chains, perhaps the most tangible is our Procedure Browsable Space™ gaining a new feature in the form of search. That’s right, you read quite correctly, our Procedure Browsable Space now comes fully-equipped with search functionality, across work packages, enabling legislation, organisations accountable to Parliament and business steps. Not only can you search across more facets than our statutory instrument and treaty tracking websites allow, this search is punctuation agnostic, so you shouldn’t hit the same “smart” quotes problems you may have stumbled over on our more official offerings. Thanks Shedcode James.
Offstage, Librarian Jayne continues to ponder whether an integrated search over all searchable facets might be required.
Sticking with the subject of jobs well done, James also finds himself in the number two spot of our ‘weekly’ hit parade. Why not just hand him the Librarian of the Week trophy and have done with it, you might ask. Let’s keep him keen, we answer.
For some time now our crack team of librarians have been working hand in glove with Silver and his Data Language colleagues to prototype a Knowledge Base for the House of Commons Library. The first output of which has been focussed on front of house librarians directing enquiry traffik to research colleagues. We can’t really ‘work in the open’ on this one because there’s a small amount of personal data involved, authentication of some type being required. The frontend of the work was properly purely prototype and a marker had been put down for a rebuild. The problem being finding someone with time on their hands to do that. In the meantime, the boss boss boss ‘brarian - or The Librarian as we call him - is keen that we share progress with Library colleagues. Librarian Susannah decided the best bet was to split efforts and run the two tasks - demoing what we’ve built and rebuilding - in parallel. Whilst redevelopment continued, the prototype effort would be quite good enough to tout round and get feedback. That was until the Parliamentary Computational Section put their foot down with a firm hand and declared basic authentication verboten. At which point, the prototype stopped working.
What to do then? Paying for Data Language to integrate with Parliament’s Single-Sign On was one option, but felt like a hell of a waste when we knew their website code was destined for the recycle bin. At which point, up popped Shedcode James with a different idea. And a much better one: Silver took a backup of any and all personal data and stripped it from the prototype website. The prototype being personal data free, it was no longer necessary to hide its existence from the web. So Data Language colleagues followed up by removing basic authentication. Which means Librarian Susannah is now able to demonstrate and gather feedback, with assurances that contact details will follow in due course. First problem mostly solved.
Up in Sheffield, the second problem is also getting solved. James has been wrapping his head around the Cypher query language and churning out production-ready pixels. A couple of Service Now tickets later, and the rebuilt website was sitting on the Parliament domain, tucked up behind Cloudflare for protection and adapted to work with Parliament’s Single Sign-On solution.
Thank you for all your efforts Shedcode James. We’d be lost without you.
Still in Sheffield - or the Properly Northern Estate as we call it these days - Developer Jon continues to slave away in the pixel mines. Back down in Westminster, our crack team of librarians continue to test his efforts. Trello cards continue to thunder across the net and chalk dust continues to get kicked up from the baseline.
This week, we’re happy to report progress on both search result pages and object pages. Kicking off with the former, Jon’s been tinkering with our taxonomy service lookup - weeknotes passim - which is now no longer case sensitive. So a very shouty search for BRITISH AIRWAYS resolves to the same taxonomic concept as a slightly more polite search for British Airways.
Jon has also fixed a mysterious mix-up whereby a search for monkey nuts returned results for monkey pox. Which is not a mistake any of us wish to make. Your regular correspondent has gazed at that card and is honestly none the wiser. Will no-one think of the scribe?
Meanwhile, searches returning no results - such as this search for Librarian Jayne’s grandad - had been crashing the application. This is also now fixed.
Finally, the wee widget that tells you what page you’re on, how many pages there are and the query you typed is now considerably less noisy than it was last week.
Over on our object pages, the labels for both Select Committee reports and Government responses to Select Committee reports are both singularised appropriately, and The Claw - the tool our crack team of librarians use to debug what Search is actually doing, its name being based on the contortions one’s hand must make in order to invoke it - which had gone missing from object pages, is now back and neater than ever.
Text changes have also taken place, there’s finally something to read on our new homepage and our assorted meta pages have gained a paragraph or two.
Should our dear user be churlish enough to be uninterested in the pages we’ve made and decide they want to head out and find some different ones, Jon has updated our routes file to catch such requests and get back with a very polite 404.
No week would be complete without a little procedural map making and this week is no different. Procedural cartographers everywhere will be delighted to learn that our Commons committee component for proposed negative statutory instruments has been completely redrawn - dare one say refactored? - to include the Foreign Affairs Committee, who appear to taken a sudden interest in such matters. Queries have, obviously, been updated accordingly.
Knowing our dear reader has the memory of an elephant, we feel sure they’ll recall March 2025 when we cheerfully announced we’d finally added explicit modeling of motions to refer to both our maps and data. At that point, whilst the maps were considered correct, the waymarks of an instrument’s journey through Parliament were not, as business items were not being actualised against these new business steps. Now, thanks to the diligence of Librarian Martin, every work package for every instrument that’s been considered in Grand Committee or in a Delegated Legislation Committee has been revisited and had both the appropriate question and the outcome of that question actualised. That being a grand total of 2,854 work packages across both Houses since our service first kicked off in 2017. The Investigatory Powers (Communications Data) (Relevant Public Authorities and Designated Senior Officers) Regulations 2020 being one such instrumental work package. Top quality librarianship, Martin.
Elsewhere, our cartographic efforts continue to bear fruit in our now world famous Procedure Browsable Space™. Recent efforts have concentrated on decorating lists of things. Which means some of our business step lists now come with actualisation counts - that is, how many times a certain procedural step has been taken. And some of our work package lists now come with flags indicating instances of a committee bringing the instrument to the attention of the House, or a Member tabling a motion as part of that work package. The flags have been added to the various lists of work packages by procedure and by organisation - you can find examples here. Please feel free to click around.
Psephological efforts are currently concentrated on solving the problem of how we publish the results of the next general election in a more staged fashion than last time around. At this point, our dear reader is possibly thinking, “hang on. Didn’t you do that last year?” Dear reader, you would not be wrong, we did. Way back in 2025, week 49, we were pleased to report that staged publishing had been built and signed off to the specification agreed. Unfortunately, further thought revealed that specification to be, if not exactly wrong, lacking the appropriate level of detail.
Our previous efforts broke the election down into four stages:
post-dissolution and pre-statements of nomination: publish a candidates coming soon message
post-statements of nomination and pre-election: publish the candidate list
as soon as possible post-election: publish the candidate list with winners picked out
once all results had been verified: publish all the numbers
The first two states being mutually exclusive. Which, on the surface, feels fine. But, should events get the better of us and some natural disaster or the death of a candidate take place, one of the 650 elections might get delayed. In which case, we had no means to publish winners or full results for any of the other 649. Which would be less than ideal. Our new approach separately captures the publication stage on individual elections within a general election as well as the publication stage of the general election as a whole, allowing us flexibility. Or at least it will do when we manage to patch the code back together. Which is currently scattered all over the floor of Michael’s computer. Again.
A question that’s been bothering us for a wee while is how to handle notice of a Member’s suspension. And indeed notice of when that suspension period is due to end. Notice of suspensions not yet in effect is information that has been known to head in our direction, but we’ve never been quite sure what effect entering that information into the Members’ Names Information System might have. Would something go horribly wrong and the Member get flagged as having a status of suspended before the suspension actually started? It all felt a little risky. Happily, Librarian Phil has now tested what happens in the staging environment, and, even more happily, it all works perfectly. The Member remaining unsuspended until the suspension period begins, and the status expiring when the suspension period expires. Happy with his answer, Phil has added these new facts to the MNIS manual. Because of course he has.
Over on the more procedural branch of the taxonomy, our crack team of librarians have been stroking chins over the question of what on earth a consolidated fund debate might have been and whether a new taxonomic concept might be needed to index such things. Research ensued and a conclusion was reached. It turns out they were adjournment debates that took place after the consolidated fund debate, and not actually part of the financial proceedings proper. No new taxonomic concept needed, just a tour through old records to apply the adjournment debate concept appropriately. A task which Librarian Emma happily took on and has now completed. Excellent librarianship by the bucket load.
In these post-COVID days, it seems it’s not often we get to head off on tour. Perhaps we’re out of the habit. Imagine then our delight when Young Robert and Silver pulled out all the stops to organise a trip to Scotland’s second city. Or first city. Opinions differ here, and we’re keeping our counsel. Ably hosted by BBC Scotland, we were treated to talks and discussion across the information management / artificial intelligence spectrum. Our Jeremy kicked off the day with a backstage tour of the BBC’s linked data efforts to date. Our Anya gave a very creditable performance on the work of her crack team of librarians and how they somehow manage to knit a bag of data spanners into something resembling an outfit. Our Michael rose like Lazarus following an unfortunate encounter with a dodgy bit of mutton to join Anya on stage. Our Benjy stepped up to demo some of his agentic, LLM-based efforts. Although by that point, your regular correspondent was firmly back in his sickbed. All reports are that Ben’s talk went down a storm. Big Man Brickley didn’t give a talk as such, instead memorably ending the day by inviting the assembled to “lick the tarantula” before providing several pub-based demonstrations of what he’s managed to cobble together by taking an old copy of Librarian Jayne’s procedure data and pointing a whole host of busy bee agents at it. More to follow, we hope.