Collection Policies

Describes the policies for intake of data into the repository.

Qualifying Criteria for Inclusion of a Dataset

• This repository operates primarily on an opportunistic data collection standard, i.e. the repository's curators collect the majority of the datasets included in the repository, since it is unlikely that data creators (state legislators proposing and passing legislation) are unlikely to seek out this repository for data deposit.

  • Data can be from any U.S. state or the federal government concerning proposed legislation from anytime in the past decade.

  • The legislation in a given dataset must propose some policy or policies that are directly and explicitly related to libraries and/or library workers. Bills that may or may not have downstream effects on libraries and intellectual freedom are not expected to be included in this repository at this time.

  • This repository houses information on bills, not laws. If a bill is passed into a law, the status of the bill should be reflected in the data with a note listing an identifier for the new law. If a dataset is found to have information regarding both bills and laws, it is subject to rejection or revision by the author.

Requirements for the Contents of Data Packages

Formatting requirements:

• Bill tracking data containing information about states, sponsors, bill titles and summaries, and actions taken on the bill should be submitted as .csv files.

  • Each bill tracking .csv should be structured according to the standard variables in the data dictionary.

• The text of bills themselves, as well as supplemental data about each bill tracking datasets, should be submitted as .txt or as .pdf files.

Required data package contents:

• Data files

  • Folders must have descriptive names that indicate the year and state where the data comes from. If the data cover federal rather than state bills, the folder names should reflect this.

    • The standard file names within these folders will be bill.csv (contains data on each bill of the dataset) and history.csv (correlates the actions taken for each bill by using the bill number). See example datasets for more information.

    • Additional data files beyond bills.csv and history.csv being included in the submission is up to the judgement of the depositor and the curators upon review.

• Documentation files

  • Description about the nature of the data and data collection methods

  • Manifest that describes what files are in the submission and an MD5 checksum value