 So today, I'm very happy to have Lisa Nickum, who has been the government publication librarian at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden Colorado for the past 20 years. During that time, she has been involved in teaching in two courses over several years. One is a scientific basis for environmental regulations, and the other is environmental law, where she has heightened her knowledge of federal regulations. And we are very excited to have her here with us today to talk about federal regulations. So Lisa, the floor is yours. Well, good morning and afternoon. I am happy to be here today to talk to you about federal regulations. So with that, I want to say that if you have any questions, that as I move through the slides today, please ask. I figure that questions are generally answered better when a thought arises. Of course, I will answer any questions at the end of the presentation as well. So these are images portraying a lot of the typical feelings by the U.S. population when they think of federal regulations. They depict the overuse and the absurdity of regulations. But today we are not here to debate the pros and cons of regulations. As librarians and information professionals, it is important to know where and how to effectively find regulations and to get them to our users who need them. For federal regulations, we start with the federal register and the code of federal regulations. These are the two major sources. So we will cover during this session brief history, and I mean brief when I say that, of U.S. or federal regulations. If you want more information, the Office of the Federal Register has a lot of great information on their website. Then we will spend the majority of our time describing the organization and content of the federal register, the code of federal regulations, and related regulatory sources, as well as how to form citations which are very useful if you have those to find information. And we will end with looking at several of the tools that are out there to search the content of the federal register, the code of federal regulations, and some related counterparts. So we will move right into kind of the beginning of regulation, or at least in the 20th century. Things were not going so well in the U.S. Regulations were not known to a lot of the citizens, but this began to change in the 1930s with the New Deal legislation. Congress, before that time, Congress had been granted the responsibility for most of the regulatory activity, but after the New Deal legislation, executive agencies were given the authority to regulate social and economic issues. Also before the New Deal legislation, most citizens did not know of the regulations that they were in there that they had to comply with. And often cases were decided on secret law, which was unknown to most people. After the legislation, the New Deal legislation, they began to ensure access to these regulations and their effect in advance so people would know what they needed to follow. And they also tried to produce a centralized filing system and publication system. And also during this time, the U.S. courts began to see these secret laws that were being applied as constitutional problems. Okay, there are two main laws or acts that were crucial to this. The first, the Federal Register Act was signed in 1935, and this gave public access to the regulations. And it created a legal structure for the federal regulatory system. The law indicates the name used for the first publication, the Federal Register. This came out in 1936, and it is a single publication to find the federal regulations. It includes all executive agency rules, notices, and presidential documents. It is published on all the days the federal government is open, so it is not published on weekends, federal holidays, or what we've seen this year, snow days, or days during a government shutdown. In 1937, the year after the Federal Register started, the Code of Federal Regulations, which is a codification of the Federal Register, was added. In 1946, the Administrative Procedure Act was signed into law, and this ensured fairness and public participation. They ensured that the laws, or I'm sorry, not the laws, the rules published in the Federal Register were in proposed form, meaning that they weren't finalized right at first. There was a time to comment on them, and a time to talk about the rules before they were finalized. And it was important during this time that the legal basis for the rule be included in the published version in the Federal Register. All right, these are the two sources, and I just wanted to put them here and have some way of looking at them. It's very hard when you're doing all these things electronically. This is what the sources look like in printed form. Like most government information these days, these titles are also available electronically from a variety of sources. And this is currently, there is an act moving through the House of Representatives that would remove the statutory requirements and stop these sources from being printed. They still would be available electronically. This act is the Federal Register Modernization Act. It's HR 4195. Many library groups are against this, particularly the AALL, and are speaking out about it. The laws keep coming to affect these two sources, and that's the most recent one that I'm aware of. Okay, so before you get to any publication of rules, there has to be something that triggers this rule making. This is where the regulatory process begins. I've indicated several different avenues that this can take. On the upper left-hand page, I have the congressional branch. This is where the majority of rules come from through legislation. They can also come through congressional hearings and reports. On the upper right-hand part of the screen, I have the executive branch. And the rules can come from executive orders, office of management and budget circulars, and agencies acting on their own initiatives and missions, and that they could also come from the Federal Advisory Committee. Down in the lower right-hand, I have the judicial branch, and rules can come from court orders from this part of the government. And there are other ways that rules can come about, and I have this on the lower left-hand side. There can be a petition for rule making by affected parties or organizations. It can come from emergency situations, technological developments, and of course political factors. So that's what triggers rule making. Let's get right into some of the rules. This, before we do that, this indicates some of the agencies that are responsible for creating rules or regulations and enforcing them. Certainly this is not all of them, but this just gives you a visual idea of what the two sources contain through these particular agencies. So let's get right on to the organization of the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations. This is getting into the meat of the session here. The Federal Register contains the initial publishing of the information, and obviously it's in chronological order each day. The Federal Register is published in a new thing, so obviously it's in chronological order. The agencies are responsible for publishing their rules and enforcing them. They can publish notices of new changes or deletions of federal regulations that they oversee. When you look at the Federal Register, each issue is organized alphabetically by agency, and then within that, within each agency, the organization is the rules, the final rules, the proposed rules, and then the notices. This can be, there can be an agency that just has a notice in a particular Federal Register or a proposed rule or a final rule or combinations, or they don't even have to be represented in each individual Federal Register publication. Another part of the Federal Register is the CFR, the Code of Federal Regulations, parts affected. When rules are either both proposed and final, they have to indicate which parts of the Federal Register of the Code of Federal Regulations that they will affect and they will change. This is found in the table of contents, at the end of the table of contents, and this is just a list of the CFR parts affected for that particular Federal Register issue. And then if you look at the very end of the Federal Register, there is a Reader's Aid, and this lists the CFR parts affected for a current month. So for instance, if we were to look at the April 16th Federal Register and go down and look at the Reader's Aid, it would be all of those CFR parts affected for April. There is another publication that ties both the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations together because they do work together. And that is called the List of Sections Affected. And we will look at that later, but there is something that goes beyond the current month. The Code of Federal Regulations is a republishing of the regulations after they've already been published in final form in the Federal Register. They are codified and they are put into subjects. There are 50 titles within the Code of Federal Regulations, and those are representing the various subjects. And there are about 200 volumes. And each of the Code of Federal Regulations is revised and reissued on an annual basis. And that is done in different titles. So for instance, if you look at the very bottom, if you were interested in Title 20, that would be revised and reissued as of April 1st. So they don't do them all at one time because it's so many titles. So we'll start out looking at the proposed rules in the Federal Register, the content of what's in them. These are, these can cover, the proposed rules can cover many different situations including advance notices before rules put out, petitions for rules, negotiated rulemaking between two parties. They can extend the comment time for an already published proposed rule. And they can withdraw or change a previously published rule. So there are many different ways that the agencies can list how they're moving forward on their rules and regulations. A thing that I need to say is rules and regulations are considered the same thing within the Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations content. So I may go back between rules and regulations. They mean exactly the same thing in this, in both of these publications. If you are looking at the proposed rules, you may see the abbreviation NPRM. This is acronym that stands for Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. You are looking at the same publications. If you didn't go to any other publications, this is just an abbreviation that is often used. By law, any proposed rule needs to include announcements of changes to the CFR. So that's always included. They need to have regulatory text. They need to solicit comments. And they need to have people in place within the agency to handle these comments. So let's look at the Federal Register content here. I have one of the first pages in the Federal Register. It indicates the volume. In the Federal Register, the volume persists with that title through an entire year. So in 2014, the volume throughout January through December will be volume 79. The number indicates the number of times that this is, that the Federal Register is published during the year. So the 10th publication was put out on January 15th. There are usually about 250 numbers per volume in a given year. The page numbers run consecutively throughout the year. So by January 15th, we are already above 2,500 as far as page numbers. On the right side, you'll see I have highlighted where you can find the Federal Register volume and number and date, as well as what we're going to look at next, which is a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency. And that gives you at the bottom the page numbers where that is, where you can find that, as well as the title. So this is the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rule that was indicated on the last slide. And as you can see, this has the name, would have highlighted here. It has the name of the agency, the CFR parts affected. So for this proposed rule, it would affect Title 40 Code of Federal Regulations Part 98 that tells you exactly where you will see the changes if this proposed rule becomes final and it's codified in the Code of Federal Regulations. Below that is some docket numbers used by the agency itself. So they probably don't mean a lot to most people. If you were going to the agency and needed to look at, you wanted to look at their dockets where they can pile all their information for particular rules and regulations, this is what you would use. And then the number below, I believe, is the number given by the Code or by the Office of the Federal Register. Below that is the title of this particular proposed rule. It's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, Amendments and Confidentiality Determinations for Fluorinated Gas Production. It's a mouthful. Below that is standard. The agency, the action, the summary, also not included in this are the addresses where you can get to, if you need to, write about this if you want to send comments. And then they have a contact information individual who will be able to take comments or questions. And then they have supplementary information and this is where the meat of the regulations are located. This is where you get the scientific information if it's a scientific regulation where you get the reason that they're doing the regulation. This is how, why the agency is asking for the regulations. So this is really the meat of what is in the regulation. So looking at the final rules, this is after a proposed rule usually has been gone through the process. The final rules are the indication that it's gone through the process. It's gone through a comment period and this has been decided to go to the final stage. So these final rules are those that have general applicability to the public. And if they're not, it would not be published in the Federal Register or obviously the Code of Federal Regulations. They amend obviously the Code of Federal Regulations. They generally have a date, effective date, usually 30 days from the date of publication. Sometimes it's 60 days for major rules that will require more time to put in place. And sometimes they can be on the date of publication for such things as emergencies or things that don't really affect the public but really affect how the agency deals with a regulation. There are also interim rules and direct rules and other documents relating to previous rules. Generally these, while they follow the same format as the proposed rules, meaning that they have to have the agency and the CFR affected information and the dates, the rules and the dates and, sorry, supplementary information. Generally the supplementary information is not as detailed as it was in the proposed rule. So this information, if it's the same, they just rely on the proposed rule for people to go back to. And they indicate the proposed rule at the end of the final rule. So you can, so it ties to the two rules together. If that supplementary information changed during the comment period, they will publish it again. So this is an example of a final rule. And once again, it's the Environmental Protection Agency. It's a final rule. And what I've highlighted here is the date. This date is effective on March 10th and the publication date is February 6th. So that's about 30 days, a little longer. Except for, and there's one part of this, which will be effectively effective immediately on February 6th. So it's important to look at the dates and see if there's anything that you need to follow up on. I went through and I found the information. And this is how EPA is going to make a judgment as to whether certain individuals or groups are affected by this regulation. So it's actually making it easier to deal with this regulation for groups who are just too small to have this regulation affect them as it is written. So that's why it's going into effect, because it really affects how the agency handles this. And we'll be, from what I read, a little bit easier on the population that this regulation will serve. This is an example of another final rule, but this is a direct final rule. And this came about without any proposed regulation, proposed rule. So they went directly to the direct final rule. And the reason that they did this, if you read through the summary, is it gives FDA, FDA is trying to increase its own transparency. So this is something where the agency is trying to be better as far as being more transparent to the public. And because of this, it's directly enforced. It does not affect the public. Okay. The list of CFR sections affected, this is the LSA that I talked about earlier. And this is a publication to, this is intended to be used as a tool to keep any CFR title up to date. It's published monthly to track the changes of the CFR. And as I said earlier, similar information exists in the Federal Register for each month. But looking at a longer period than a month, this publication, the list of sections affected needs to be used. There are now electronic tools that handle this for you. I have listed the ECFR. This is a joint project between the Office of the Federal Register and the Government Printing Office. And it is a nice product, and it can be used to get the most up-to-date information. I have down below a currency note. This is a currency note that was there when I looked at this a few days ago. I looked at it this morning, and it's current as of April 14th. So it's only a couple days out of date, so it's fairly current. However, this is not considered an official legal addition. So if you're using it for legal purposes, you have to use the list of sections affected, which is a little more difficult to use, as opposed to the ECFR or other tools out there. But it's a beta project, and hopefully it will move towards official status in the future. Also, within the Federal Register, there is twice a year the unified regulatory agenda is published. Usually in the spring and fall, that's general. It can be in other times. I've seen it in summer and winter as well. This was started in 1983, and this provides the agency. The agencies are to list the rules that they are working on in development or in review for the next 12, maybe 18 months in the future. So this gives the public an idea of where the agencies are working and what rules they're working on. The access to this agenda is really through electronic sources. There is this reginfo.gov site, which we will look at later. And this has been done primarily to reduce printing costs. These publications, and they're just published as the Federal Register for the date, whatever date that they decide. If they decide to do this on May 5th, that will be the May 5th edition of the Federal Register, the unified agenda. But they're very large, and so as a way to reduce the printing costs, they try to send everyone to the reginfo.gov. In 1980, there was an act, the Regulatory Flexibility Act, that regulates the agenda to include only those entries that are likely to have a significant economic impact. On a substantial number of entities. So they don't want rules and regulations that affect very few people. They really want these regulations that are listed in here to have significant, they should be significant regulations. The content of the unified agenda includes the abstract of the rule, the timetable that the agency is planning on developing this rule or proposing this rule. It should include the potential effects of the rule, how this is going to affect different industries or entities, and of course the contact information. In the fall edition of the unified agenda, the regulatory plan is also included in that. It's not in the spring, but in the fall. And this regulatory agenda is the statement of the administration's policies and priorities towards the regulatory, the regulatory system. So let's go into the Code of Federal Regulations content. The Code of Federal Regulations exists to present to the public the complete text of agency regulation in one organized publication is intended to be a convenient reference to the regulations. And that's why it exists. So people don't have to look through day by day of the Federal Register. There are, as I said before, 50 titles. The titles are the basic subjects that have been defined that the regulations will fall into. Each title is broken down into chapters, parts, sections and appendices. Once again, the federal rules that are included are those rules that have general applicability and for current and future effect. This was also indicated in the Federal Register. This is an example. This is a very busy page and I don't expect people to read through it all. But this page indicates all the different titles that are within the Code of Federal Regulations. And I just wanted to show you how immense this title was. It's very large and it's large, but it's very well organized. Okay, this is an example of the Code of Federal Regulations, although it says Code of Federal Register out there. It's Code of Federal Regulations. As you can see, this is Title 12, Banks and Bankings. And see there are chapters under there and parts. I just wanted to give you a sense of all the different parts of the CFR. As you can see, parts 300 through 302 are reserved. This sometimes happens when agencies are allowing space for future regulations or sometimes they just have space there. And they're indicating that nothing is missing from this. If people saw that it went from 299 to 303, they would wonder where their parts 300 to 302 were. They're just trying to indicate to the public that, nope, there's nothing in there. They're reserved. Maybe for future use, we don't know. So this is, I'm indicating the part and the section in the first part of the Code of Federal Regulations for each chapter. You will see what looks like, it almost looks like a table of contents that indicates what you're going to find in there. And those are all the sub parts and everything below that. I've highlighted a couple places where I can find something within and these are not. There is lots of information between the table of contents and the other indicated sections, the 303.24, they're not as close together as this appears. But that's how you find things. If you're interested in application for deposit insurance for an interim institution, this is where you would go to find the regulations that apply to that. Citations just briefly, the citations are pretty short and they're pretty universally used. For the Federal Register, the first number that you see is the volume number. FR is for the Federal Register and the 1234 is for the page number. Since the page numbers run consecutively throughout an entire yearly volume, this page number is unique. So this little citation 64 or 68 FR 1234 is an exact citation and we'll get anybody who looks at this to the right page. For the CFR, we have a similar situation. It's a little longer. The 40 represents the title, which is the protection of the environment. CFR represents the Code of Federal Regulations and then you have the part and the section 50.4. Each of the titles, as we saw before, has chapters which generally name the agencies responsible for the regulations under that. These chapters are not part of the citations. They don't need to be. If you're using a CFR that is not current, not the current CFR, you should put the date used because if there's no date, what's assumed is that you are using the current Code of Federal Regulations. These are some free tools that I have found useful to get a good background on these sources and to search the tools. Although the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations are published by the Office of the Federal Register within NARA, the government printing office through their FTSIS website and the Office of Management and Budget through their REG Info website provide important links to these publications. And I would be a remiss if I did not mention the regulations.gov site that's on here, which has allowed much more citizen participation since it's arrived on scene. We will look at these quickly individually so you get a sense of what they look like. This is, for those who haven't seen this, this is the FTSIS basic search site. I've highlighted where you can do more searches through the advanced and retrieved by citation on the right side of the search box. And people can also browse through these publications, which is useful, particularly for the Code of Federal Regulations, to find information in there. We will go to the advanced search feature. This is the advanced search within the Code of Federal Regulations. You can see on here that you have many more limits for your search in the search-in drop-down box. If you know different parts of the CFR where you know where things are, you can search directly by them. This helps to narrow down the search because when you're searching, you are searching through a full-text publication. So the more specific you can be with your search terms, the better off you'll be. I've also listed the coverage that is available through the government printing office site, FTSIS site. It's 1994 to the present, which is pretty typical of most of the publications on the FTSIS, not everything, but a lot of them started in the mid-90s. And here we have the ability to use the browse search, which can be quite helpful, especially for the Code of Federal Regulations. This is an image of a breakdown of Title X, which is energy. You can see I've broken it down down under Chapter 3 under Subpart B. You can break it down even more. I've gone down as far as I can in this. So if you're interested in how to file a complaint or anything about the employee complaint resolution process within the Department of Energy, this is where you can find it. And if you are unfamiliar with how this publication is set up, this can give you a sense of how things are set up and the ability to drill down to information. This can be used effectively by novices as well as advanced users. This is Regulations.gov. This is what I was talking about previously, and this source is really for participating in the regulatory process. It's for promoting more efficient and effective rulemaking through public involvement. On the site, you can find, read, and comment on current regulations going through the process. So this is important to the general public. And you can find a lot of information on the regulations. You can find the proposed rules, notices, scientific and technical findings, guidance, adjudications, and comments submitted by others. So it's really a powerful tool, especially for those people who want to participate in the process. This is managed by the EPA's E-Rulemaking Program Management Office with the assistance of partner agencies. You can get to most agencies regulations through this site, although some agencies do not participate in the E-Rulemaking process. And so you have to go directly to those agencies to participate. This is the E-CFR that I talked about previously. This is the tool that can help you get the most current CFR. Often when you're looking at a CFR, especially print, it can be very out of date. But this helps to update it. As you can see under the notice, it currently cannot be used as the official source of updating the CFR. And for legal purposes, it's not able to be used. But for the majority of the user population, this works quite well. This is the reginfo.gov site from the Office of Management and Budget. This is a great site, has lots of great images, and it has graphical representations of what's going on within the agencies and the rulemaking process. They call this their dashboard. It's a really nice site, and it presents rules in a different way. Of course, if you can go to each agency, EPA, while it participates in the E-Rulemaking process, it does have its own EPA docket site. The dockets bring together all of the information that are used in the regulatory activity. The one for fee subscription site that I have here is looking at is the ProQuest Congressional site. It was formally owned by Alexis Nexas and before that, CIS, Congressional Information Service. The main two reasons I like to use this site more than the public site is the content, the coverage. For the Federal Register, it's 1980 to the present, and Code of Federal Regulations, it's 1981 to the present. That's really nice, especially for the Federal Register, looking back further at some of the proposed and final rules before 1994. Also, it has greater search and capabilities. It's a site that you pay for. Just to show that, this is both the advanced search and the search by citation. You can limit the action, which you can do in the other ones, but the date function is a lot nicer on this site compared to the other sites. So in conclusion, I hope that I have shed some light on the federal regulations and the regulatory process and how to find those regulations. The good news is that there are lots of websites that are freely available and are improving. The Office of Federal Register wants to ensure access to these regulations as their mission to inform the citizens of their rights and obligations document the actions of the federal agencies and provide a forum for public participation in the democratic process. On the other hand, there are legislators currently that want to limit the access to these publications, which is concerning for many information professionals. And better searching and coverage for these tools that are publicly accessible is always welcome. I have enjoyed talking to you today. And at this time, even though it's close to the end of the time period, I would like to answer any questions. And I see that Ann has a question here. What does it mean when FT-SITS indicates that the CFR is available for 1994 to present? That means that the FT-SITS goes back to the 1994 edition of the Code of Federal Register. So some people need to go back to see what the regulations were for a specific year. So they need to go back and to the Code of Federal Regulations at that time. ProQuest makes the 1980 forward available. So if someone needs to go back to 1985 to look at what regulations were in effect for that time period, that is why that is important. They're outdated as far as not being current, but if you're looking at rules that you were supposed to follow in 1991, you need to look at the Code of Federal Regulations for that time period. How can you tell what is currently in effect and what is outdated? That is where the list of sections affected and the ECFR is important. That will tell you what is currently in effect. So if I search FT-SITS for regulations, then I have to check the LSA to ensure what I search result is a current or out of date. Unfortunately, that is the case right now. You can either search ECFR, but if you are doing something that requires official citations for legal purposes, you do have to check the LSA to ensure that anything is up to date. When you are searching, it's important to look at when that publication was published, and that's why I listed the four times the CFR is published through the year. So you have a date which you can go forward from that time to see if anything has changed in the regulations that you are looking at. I will send out my contact information. Any other questions? Oh, I'm glad that you feel a little more confident. This is a complex process, and it just takes using the tools and playing around and seeing what's available to you.