Historical Rulemaking Web site
The Historical Rulemaking Web Site will allow legislators, state agency staff, the Office of Administrative Hearings, and the general public to track the progress of administrative rulemaking from 1983 to date. The project involves extracting the public information contained in an internal rule tracking system maintained by the Office of the Revisor of Statutes and displaying the information on a public web site. In addition, the project involves scanning of additional historical documents, such as State Registers, and providing a method for historical documents in the possession of state agencies, OAH, and the Legislative Reference Library to be added to the web site.
$35,000 is appropriated in fiscal year 2013 from the arts and cultural heritage fund to the revisor of statutes to design and implement a Web site to provide the public searchable access to historical documents relating to state agency rulemaking. It is anticipated that the revisor of statutes will match this appropriation from carryforward funds and that the revisor will use the carryforward funds to design and implement a Web site that will provide the public searchable access to future state agency rulemaking documents.
The Revisor's servers, in total, received 254 million hits in 2012. For the Historical Rules Status System, 5,000 hits in the first month of web availability and 50,000 hits in the first year of availability would be a good indicator of web site use. The Revisor's office has specialized software that can count the number of hits on this system.
$4,239.35 for ACS, Inc., to scan the old State Registers and apply optical character recognition software.
$4,120 for MN IT in the executive branch for programming services relevant to state agency documents.
$26,086.50 for System Specialties, under contract with the Revisor's office, to program the new web site and display the relevant documents.
The $554.15 remaining of grant funds will likely be spent for additional programming work by System Specialties. In addition, in order to complete the project, we are anticipating that approximately $5,000 in Revisor carryforward funds will be needed for System Specialties to complete the programming work necessary for the new web site to go live.