[ Silence ] >> Welcome and thank you for joining today's public forum on Copyright IT Modernization. If for some reason we're unable to get to your question during today's session, you can submit questions about Copyright IT Modernization to askcmo@copyright.gov. And that address will be presented at the end of the presentation as well. Without further ado though, I'd to introduce our first presenter, the Acting Register of Copyrights, Maria Strong is going to start us off by providing a general overview of Copyright IT Modernization. >> Thanks for the introduction, David. And welcome, everyone, to this virtual public forum on Copyright Office IT Modernization. And I'm sure many listening this morning are well aware that the Copyright Office is engaged in office-wide modernization efforts. Our goal is to reimagine the entire office by, one, building a new enterprise information technology system designed to be flexible and easy for users to use, two, modernizing supporting IT systems, and 3, further ensuring that office practices and processes are efficient and productive. This public forum is the first of an ongoing series of opportunities to share information with the public on the process of office modernization efforts and to receive public comment and feedback on that work. This forum was prompted by Senators Tillis, Leahy, Cornyn, and Hirono, who had asked the Library to form a public stakeholder working group on Copyright IT Modernization for the purpose of expanding communication with external stakeholders on the IT Modernization of Copyright Office systems as well as to provide a public forum for questions and input. And an important piece of this initiation will be to hold two public events each year in July and January with this process being jointly managed by the Library's Office of the Chief Information Office, called OCIO, and the Copyright Office. And today's forum launches that part of this initiation. And while there's a lot already going on in terms of the information on what the office is doing on our website, webinars, and Congressional testimony, and in various conferences where our staff members also speak, this forum, as well as the ones that follow, will have the benefit of participation by the staff of the Copyright Office and OCIO, who work on modernization activities day-to-day. The Library and the Copyright Office will be seeking to form a public working group of stakeholders and interested parties to provide ongoing sustained engagement on issues related to Copyright Office modernization. Coming later this summer, we'll be announcing a process by which we will accept self-nominations from the public to be a part of this working group with the goal of selecting anywhere between 15 to 20 representative individuals, who reflect a diverse stakeholder categories of those people who use or are affected by the office's IT services that are being modernized. The subject for this working group will be limited to technology related aspects of modernization of the Copyright Office, including both the copyright IT systems and the broader library IT systems that interface or support copyright operations. It's intended that this group will be frontline participants at these biannual events. But all events will remain open to the public. So please stay tuned for more details on that. Right now, let's take a brief look at where we are on this modernization journey. Next slide, please. So IT functions are centralized in the Library of Congress. And as a service unit of the Library, we in the Copyright Office rely on the OCIO for technology services, including system and software development. While the Copyright Office provides the business needs and the Library provides technical IC services, we are working together towards modernizing the Copyright Office's IT systems. And our office collaborates closely with OCIO. We provide business information to OCIO. And they, in turn, undertake the development work. But Barton will be speaking more about the IT development processes next. Fiscal Year 2019 marked the first year that Congress appropriated funds specifically for IT modernization. And this allowed both the Copyright Office and OCIO to continue laying the groundwork for a modernized Enterprise Copyright System, also known as ECS. And the Copyright Office greatly appreciates the support of Congress in approving current modernization funding through Fiscal Year 2023 for general modernization and through Fiscal 2025 for our Historical Records Program. So for more than two years, we have had the dedicated webpage on modernization seen here on the screen. And on this webpage, you'll find a number of things. So let's walk through it a little bit. Resources to a number of documents are found on the right bar, links to the recordings of our bimonthly webinars. And at the bottom, you'll see more detailed descriptions of our modernization efforts, both on the IT side and the non-IT side. So to be clear, this forum, today's forum is [inaudible] IT Development of ECS. And you can see the box on the ECS at the bottom left. And there are drop-down menus that actually provide more detail on each of those elements. And today we're going to be talking about three of these four elements, Recordation, Public Records System, and Registration. While I have the mic, I'd like to add just a few more words on the two buckets that are part of the Office's larger modernization effort beyond strictly IT development. So if you take a look in the middle block there under Modernizing Supporting IT Systems, you'll see several workstreams. The Office is building a robust business intelligence tool that will aid in analyzing office functions. And the use of this tool will improve decision making and service through analysis of common trusted data repository. We're also working to update the call center that our Public Information Office uses to answer public enquires on Copyright and Office Services. And as the Office transitions to a new storage facility in 2021, we'll implement a warehouse management system that optimizes warehouse operations and functionality to provide timely and reliable services. So those are all in process. And if you take a look on the lower right side, this third bucket involves non-IT workstreams, which address people, process, and organizational matters. So for example, we are nearing completion of a year-long review of some 66 processes, internal processes to the Office. And we're coming up with proposed internal solutions. This business process reengineering effort will be continuous throughout the ECS development process and involve developing requirements for automated workflows and procedures and analyzing how these workflows interact across our divisions. It's also important that we find ways to optimize our organizational structure and align personnel resources with the emerging needs that result from implementing ECS and future revised processes. To that end, we have engaged the Office of Personnel Management's Human Resources Solution to perform an organization analysis, workload assessment, and an associated position classification review. Change management is a strategic goal of the Office if you take a look at our strategic plan issued last year. And to that end organizational change management provides us with the tools and practices to proactively engage with the people side of change. Staff training on change management practices is well underway, as well as strategic coaching with the goal to build an internal capability that supports continuous improvement using these OCM tools. As a final section, I'd like to say a few words about our budget process. So starting in Fiscal '19, the Copyright Office received from Congress $12.1 million for general monetization to recur for a total of five years. For our Historical Records Program, we received $5 million per year for seven years. So that means in Fiscal 20, $10 of the $17.1 million was authorized as multiyear funding, which is good because that gives us flexibility to use funds across two years, which means we can use these funds through September 30, 2021. And right now we are working with OCIO to develop our Fiscal Year '21 spending plan for modernization. Given that OCIO provides the IT development, the Copyright Office and the OCIO enter into an interagency funding agreement known as an IAA under which a significant portion of our annual monetization funding from Congress is transferred from us to OCIO. And during the planning process, OCIO provides the Copyright Office with an estimate on the amounts necessarily to accomplish Fiscal Year activities. And that lump sum is transferred. For further information on our budget matters, you can see our FY '21 budget testimony, which is posted on our website under Congressional Hearings. Also, as directed by Congressional Appropriators, the Copyright Office has developed an integrated master schedule for its modernization activities. And to ensure that IMS maintains alignment with best practice criteria, the Office has recently procured expert consulting services to assist us in developing a program for IMS management, which will allow for the continuous improvement and refinement of our integrated [inaudible]. So this work on our critical path is underway. And lastly and most recently, the Copyright Office worked with the General Services Administration to issue a formal request for information on possibilities for potential contractors to manage and develop Copyright Office capabilities into a new web-based, cloud-hosted Enterprise Copyright System. This effort is a follow on market research one to an RFI that we actually did in 2018 as well. The Office hopes to use these responses for planning purposes and also possibly as the basis for a future solicitation or a request for more in-depth research. The original deadline for this RFI was extended. And both the Copyright Office and OCIO worked to answer the questions from the vendors. This docket closed on July 13th. And we expect to receive a report from the GSA in August. I know I've spoken a lot. But I definitely wanted to give everyone a context for what we're going to be seeing in the next couple of minutes. And with that, I do hope you find today's forum interesting and informative. And right now I'd like to turn the mic over to Bud Barton, who is the Chief Information Officer for the Library of Congress. Thank you. >> Thank you, Maria. And welcome, everyone, to this forum on Copyright IT Modernization. I'm glad you could join us. Ensuring that the Copyright Office has a state-of-the-art system is a top priority for the Library. And as the CIO, I'm very proud of what we are building. I'll leave the details of the ECS development to our other panelist, who you'll hear from shortly. However, before we get into those specifics, I wanted to share a little bit about how we manage technology at the Library and what that means for major IT development efforts like the ECS. The Library has some of the best IT staff in the fed government. And the Library, with tremendous support from Congress, has invested heavily in the optimization and modernization of our technology over the last several years. Building on industry-best practices and recommendations made by the Government Accountability Office and the Library's Inspector General, we've removed many longstanding inefficient and ineffective silos of technology. We've realigned our IT governance structure as well, improving our ability to strategically prioritize IT projects and investments over multiple years. The head of each of the major Library units, including the Register of Copyright, also serves on the Technology Strategy Board for the Library to ensure that business needs are always a major voice in our IT planning. We're modernizing our infrastructure, transitioning to a hybrid hosting model that leverages both the best traditional data centers have to offer and the best that cloud presence has to offer to ensure that our IT foundation will be flexible and meet our needs today and well into the future. Under the centralized IT approach that Maria mentioned earlier, business owners like the Copyright Office and the Library's technical staff work together in partnership to ensure that IT modernization efforts are successful. As the business owner, the Service Unit has Copyright Office in this specific instance define the business needs and features that their IT systems must meet. It is in the responsibility of the CIO staff to ensure that the systems are developed and meet those needs using our technical expertise, user feedback, and daily collaborative efforts within the Copyright Office for the ECS. Unlike many federal agencies, the Library has a very robust Government Development Team. We focus on building the capabilities that we need to support our unique mission. We use Modern Agile Development Approach similar to what is used in most of the big tech companies. That lets us build systems iteratively and easily adjust as necessary throughout the project to ensure that what we finally build really does meet the evolving needs of the service units and business owners. At the heart of our development effort is an extensive User Experience Design Program, which conducts user testing, gathers feedback, and ensures that we know exactly what users need in a system and making sure that we develop and meet those needs in an intuitive way so that users of the systems intuitively navigate and use that application. With Agile, iterative development and User Experience Design, the more we put into a system, the better it gets by utilizing the feedback received from the users of that system. Building complex IT systems isn't new to the Library. The Library has been developing systems for over a decade and constantly striving to adapt the latest technologies into our major IT programs, including Congress.gov, which is an authoritative system of record for the Congress. At a high level with the Copyright Office Project is on schedule and on budget. The Enterprise Copyright System will be fully functional and available for everyone to use as planned over the next several years. But when we develop this system, we won't simply be handing it over to the Copyright Office and walking away. ECS is a major IT program within the Library. And we will keep it in continuous development as part of the Agile concept. That means for years to come, we will be releasing updates based on user feedback to improve the functionality, keep the system up to speed, and meet the evolving needs of the Copyright Office and the creative community. Now before we move on, there's one topic that I wanted to provide a note of reassurance around to those of you who are asking us to entrust your creative work to us. As confidential consultants to Congress, Administrator of the National Copyright System, and stewards of the nation's cultural history, the Library is very well aware of the need to ensure security of the digital content in our care. We have significantly increased our IT security posture over the last several years. We have implemented NIST security standards with role-based access controls to ensure users can only access data they are entitled to. All Library systems have had complete security reviews and are continuously monitored. And we conduct regular penetration testing of our high-value assets. We are implementing encryption at rest as well as in motion for all sensitive Library data including e-deposits. We've also created a dedicated Information Security Office staff with true cybersecurity professionals to conduct proactive monitoring, testing, and incident management. And I want to ensure everyone that security is always a top priority for the Library and me personally. In closing, I'd like to emphasize that my job is to ensure Library IT resources are used strategically and effectively and meet the mission of the Library, which includes providing a functional, easy to use, secure Enterprise Copyright System and that it will grow with this important segment of the economy. I have great confidence in the OCIO team. And I have great admiration for the dedication and commitment of the staff of the Copyright Office. And together we will deliver for the creative. With that, I'll turn it back over to Dave. >> Thank you, Maria, and thanks, Bud. We had quite a few people join after 10:00. So I'd like to reiterate for all the attendees that you can submit questions at any time but that we'll be fielding the questions at the conclusion of all the presentations. The Question and Answer panel is buried under the button with three dots on it. It's a little bit hard to find. Our next two presenters are going to provide an overview of the system itself. Natalie Buda Smith is the Library's Chief of User Experience Design in the CIO's organization. And Sarah Garske is the Deputy Director of the Copyright Modernization Office. Natalie and Sarah are going to provide us with an overview before we dive into individual applications in the system. Take it away, Natalie. >> David, I will take it away. >> Thank you, Sarah. I apologize. >> No problem. Good morning, everyone. May I have the next slide, please? May I have the next slide, please? Thank you. A key goal of copyright modernization, as you've already heard, is to develop a new Enterprise IT system that when fully implemented will integrate and improve all of the Office's technology systems. That's the Copyright Office's technology systems. We have deemed this system the Enterprise Copyright System, also known as the ECS. The ECS is intended to address or cover all aspects of copyright services and systems, providing a user-friendly, centralized location to file applications and transfers of ownership. A consistent and optimal interface for the ECS will be facilitated through a design system that is shared across all of the applications that are contained within the ECS. Central sets of shared capabilities and services will support multiple individual workstreams, including Registration and Recordation services. Examples of those shared capabilities include shared email, payment services, financial management services, and authentication. Each service will have a business owner from the Copyright Office who will define the business needs for that function. We are focused on ensuring that the ECS is easy for users to navigate. A user-centered and flexible design, which takes into account streamlined business processes and policies will provide better access to the Office's services and improved technology. May I have the next slide, please? May I have the next slide, please? Thank you. The ECS will incorporate the Office's Registration, Recordation, Public Record, IT Licensing, IT Systems, among other functions. This is a very ambitious goal. It requires some guiding principles, a very strong, effective partnership, and constant collaboration between the U.S. Copyright Office and the Office of the Chief Information Officer, a focus on delivering the quality that exceeds user expectations through a concentration on a user-centered design, which ties together people, technology, and process. This user-centered design is crafted through a user-centered approach that begins with user research and ideation, results in prototyping, leads to testing, and then to evaluation and iterative changes. And then we circle back to the beginning of the process and repeat it in an iterative fashion. This process helps us build consistency and trust. We follow industry best practices for software engineering and system design, as implemented through the Library's project management lifecycle and systems development lifecycle processes. We also have a focus on agility and the collection of metrics and data to help enable decision making. Testing, as you will hear, is central to our user-centered design process. And as I just mentioned, test results are evaluated, prioritized for actioning, and implemented. Our user-centered design approach, our focus on agility, feedback, and applying lessons learned all support iterative development. This allows us to deploy functionality over time and build towards a fully realized functional ECS. I thank you for your time and attention this morning. And with that I'm going to turn the mic over to Natalie. >> Thanks, Sarah. Can I have the next slide? As Sarah introduced, the Enterprise Copyright System is a complex ecosystem with multiple online services that uses a technical approach that is cloud native. We're developing for the cloud at the start versus moving code into the cloud -- that is hard to say -- code into the cloud later. And it uses shared microservices. An example of a shared microservice is our notification service that will be seen in Registration, Recordation, and other services since they have similar notification needs. A notification could appear when there is an update on an account, a claim, a correspondence, and more. This notification microservice can be designed and developed as a single shared microservice and then used across multiple services so that there is an efficiency and design and development and an efficiency in the ongoing maintenance of these common features. Next slide, please. As seen in this form today, Copyright Modernization is a strong U.S. Copyright Office and OCIO partnership. Both organizations are bringing their expertise and working together at multiple levels of the organization, including multiple daily meetings where features are discussed, planned, and collaborated. We are using modern methods, including Agile, which is iterative, where we think big but start small, get feedback, and continuously improve to grow larger. We are also using user-centered practices with user research and user experience design commonly referred to as UX. User experience design is a practice of designing services for users first, rather than letting the system dictate how the user must use a service. Our user experience designers get feedback from real users through user research and then bring that knowledge back to the team throughout the entire lifecycle of the work. You'll hear more specific examples of how user research and user experience design are being practiced later. But in general we interact with actual users through all phases from initial concepts to testing and other evaluative methods such as metrics. We show users wire frames and prototypes to get their responses and ask questions about the services as a whole and for specific features. We also observe them, use parts of the services, of an entire application to understand if a feature is working well and working as expected. We use these user experience design practices for both external users, those that interact with the U.S. Copyright Office, and internal staff as examination and processing of claim is also a part of the entire workflow. Next slide, please. For this large endeavor, we are using Agile methods, which allow multiple teams to be flexible, resilient, and evolve as they learn and grow. At the heart of our collaboration is a daily scrum, where features are discussed, planned, and collaborated by team members that include business owners, product managers, subject matter experts, user experience designers, developers, dev op engineers, accessibility specialists, quality assurance testers, and security experts. In this daily scrum, they discuss ideas and any ideas that may be holding up work to solve problems. Solving problems and planning work in the daily scrum are managed in the form of user stories. User stories are very brief descriptions of work to be completed in a defined period of time or a sprint, multiple user stories in a sprint, and multiple sprints are in a release. A product roadmap is used to plan and communicate the features to be designed and developed in the sprint-based timeline. Building up plans and releases from user stories and sprints allows the multiple teams to quickly distribute work to the many individuals in their large teams and quickly shift direction to solve problems, change, and grow. Next slide, please. With our multiple teams and many people working on the Enterprise Copyright System, we are using online tools to plan, manage, groom, distribute, refine, and track user stories, sprints, and releases. Each scrum team manages their sprint work within the Product Owners Roadmap to communicate and measure work. One tool that is increasing our ability to scale and be more efficient is our design system. Our multiple scrum teams share the same design system, which allows them to build features from shared components that have already been designed and sometimes developed with the same user interface specifications that meet our accessibility standards. Next slide, please. The Enterprise Copyright System is a large ecosystem with multiple services and many scrum teams. Even though there are different features in these services, we're using a design system and microservices to build consistency between the services where best applied. We are aiming for this consistency in the fields and buttons that will operate in the same ways in different services, with login and account features that will be similar. This is helpful in two ways. It makes all those services easier to learn and understand. And it makes this large Enterprise Copyright System easier to maintain. This consistency builds trust, familiarity, and ease of use since users of both the general public and the internal staff know what to expect. As I mentioned earlier, we are getting feedback from real users, internal staff and external uses, throughout our monetization, design, and development lifecycle. This includes formative user research, where we get input in the design phase before any code is created, and summative user research, where we get input from users after code is created in the form of usability testing and metrics. These forms of feedback are brought back to the daily scrum to answer questions for the team or solve problems from a user-centric point of view. The voice of those that depend on the U.S. Copyright Office can be clearly seen in our modernized online services. Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Natalie. And thank you, Sarah. We already have a few questions trickling in for our Q&A session at the end. I just want to remind folks to keep them coming. And we'll be fielding them all at the same time. Our next two presents are KanKan Yu, with the Copyright Office's Product Owner of our Recordation Application, and David Neil, the Senior Designer responsible for much of the look and feel of the product. >> Thank you, David. >> Take it away. You're welcome, KanKan. And welcome. >> Good morning, everyone. My name is KanKan. And I'm the Product Owner for the Recordation Modernization Project. Can we get the next slide, please? So before we get into modernization and the recently released pilot system, let's quickly talk about recordation itself. So recordation process is frequently misunderstood. And registration and recordation are often confused. At a high level, the Copyright Office's Recordation section records transfers of ownership and other documents pertaining to copyright. There are many benefits to recording your document. And some of these benefits can include creating a public record entry for your document, establishing priority between conflicting transfers, and providing constructive notice. Next slide, please. You may not realize it. But recordation plays a part in many things you see and enjoy today. As an example, we have a document here for Game of Thrones that was recorded with the Copyright Office. This document details George R. R. Martin transferring his rights of the book series, A Song of Ice and Fire, to HBO. Although the first episode aired in 2011, the rights were transferred in 2009. Next slide, please. So why are we modernizing recordation? Recordation is one of the few paper-only processes remaining in the Copyright Office. And when I say paper-only, I mean everything is manual. We manually process receipt and payment. Images are manually scanned in. Things are manually sorted after we've received the information to make sure we examine documents in the order that it comes in. And you can see pictures on the right of just some of the sorting and work areas that we have. On top of that, the title and the indexing information are manually typed in by our staff. This may not be too bad if you have a document that only has a handful of works. But keep in mind that some documents can have hundreds or thousands of titles, if not more. And because everything is manual, we currently have long processing times. And just to top it off, we also have outdated IT systems that cannot keep up with our evolving customer and office needs. So Recordation Modernization does not mean just refreshing an IT system and making a digital version of the paper process. As you have heard from our leadership, modernization happens in a holistic manner. And our keys to success have a strong focus on communication and collaboration, user experience and research, building scalable and flexible system, modernizing all aspects of recordation, not just the IT component, and aligning with long-term modernization strategies. There are two phases of the Recordation Modernization effort. We have a pilot phase, which is where we are now, where we want to test new ideas and concepts, allowing us to innovate and think outside the box in a way that matches what our stakeholders and users need and what they want to do. We started with an initial release for a pilot user. And we will be continuing to build on that pilot user as it's actively being used. While our pilot is in use, we're going to be iteratively building out functionality but also addressing the user feedback that we get throughout the pilot. During the pilot period, the system will only have limited functionality. And it will be open to a limited number of participants. The full release is what we're building towards. We plan to have a cohesive set of recordation products and services available with user research and collaboration weaved into the development effort. And throughout the pilot period, we hope to reduce the recordation processing time but still produce a quality public record and also to have a system that is flexible and scalable and adaptable to what our users need today, tomorrow, and as they continue to evolve in the future. I'd like to hand it over to David so he can talk to you a little bit more about the user-centric design. >> Thanks, KanKan. Good morning. My name is David Neil. And I'm a User Experience Designer working on the Copyright Modernization effort. I'd like to share a few examples of user-centered design from the Recordation Project. By engaging users early throughout the process, we're able to gain insight into how users navigate the recordation process. Information we gathered between users and teams provides a better understanding of how they work, what their priorities are, and what obstacles they may encounter in the process. This enables the UX team to design journey maps that take the user through a process that was built using their specific input. The team can then present the journey maps for the user for feedback, refinement, and validation. Next slide, please. User testing was conducted to gather valuable feedback and input on critical parts of the application. The Recordation Team invited real users for testing and observed them interacting with the application as we recorded their screen. And as you can see to the right, there is a screen capture of a user interacting with the actual application. The team learned that different users had varying requirements regarding document certifications and that they took advantage of the online help to inform their decisions. This insight allowed the team to better organize the form fields, provide an intuitive order, and give users a voice in the process. Next slide, please. User experience activities take place ahead of development and are used to guide and inform the Recordation Project. A good example of this is when the team was designing the search feature and discovered that different groups of users had varied requirements and expected results based on that criteria. Although we put an emphasis on the input of information, we found it was equally important for users to easily find information after an application was submitted. Some users preferred a very broad and generalized search, while others wanted a more focused search. And by understanding that difference, the team was able to provide broader results for some and also create filtering options that were more targeted for others. Much of what was designed and developed in the Recordation Application is also being shared with other Copyright Modernization Projects, informing and updating the design system that they all have in common. Now I will hand it back to KanKan to take a closer look at the Recordation Application. >> Thank you, David. When we spoke about modernizing all aspects of Recordation, we're talking about the Recordation as a whole and again not just the system. So on this slide, you can find some of the analysis and outreach activities that the Office has carried out. Next slide, please. All right. Let's shift gears and get into the meat of this Modernization Project and take a look at the pilot application that was recently released to our pilot group. Even though our initial release has limited functionality, we still have a hefty list of features to kick us off. I'll highlight a few from this list since we'll deep dive in the next few slides. As part of this initial release, we are only allowing users to submit basic Section 205 documents that are complete in English only. We have brought more self-service functions to the application. Users will be able to track their application status directly through the pilot application. We have shifted to digital certificates and numbered documents, which will be delivered electronically through the pilot system. We've introduced a centralized messaging center to handle correspondences. And we've built in robust search capabilities, as you've seen earlier, because retrieving information is just as important as submitting information. Next slide, please. All right. Let's look under the hood. This is a dashboard a user will see once they log into the application. We want the initial page to be useful and actionable. And we built in many launch points so the remitter can jump directly into action. Our users here can manage their profile, add users into their organization, create or replenish user accounts entirely through self-service. For the most part, this is the similar to what we do today. We still have the organization concept, where you have multiple users exist under an organization and be able to establish a shared deposit account for payment. What we've done for the pilot is made some improvements based on the feedback we've had from our existing system. For example, currently, it's a user creates and adds funds to a deposit account. There is a manual step where the Office has to intervene to activate your account. In the pilot system, that step is automated. So the remitter doesn't have to wait before they start using their deposit account. When we spoke with our remitters, they wanted to be able to transfer applications or service requests between members of their organization in a self-service manner. This is not something you can do in the system today. But, well, because it's paper. But it is something that we've added to the pilot just due to popular demand. As mentioned earlier, the submission process is entirely online. And most of the remitter's time will be looking at the applications or the service requests. So we dedicated a lot of real estate to showing service requests or application information on their dashboard. We've put this to the test through usability testing and picked what types of information to service based on what the remitters will find helpful when looking through their applications. Your application status are mapped to our internal applications. So at any given time, you can quickly see where your document is in the examination process. Once you submit your application, you'll see the status change to pending, which means it's in queue for examination. And as soon as it's picked up by an examiner, you'll see it changed to in review. This type of visibility is not something that remitters can get to easily in the paper process. And as you can imagine, when we put this through usability testing, this feature was really well-received. Correspondence is also a source of frustration for our users today. One example comes to mind is that I've heard in the past that some emails in the Office or from the Office may be lost in routing due to filters or policies set on a user's email client. So what we've done is we've built a Centralized Messaging Center to ease a lot of that frustration that had been voiced in the past. All of the messages between the user and the Copyright Office will be accessible through the Messaging Center. And the messages are threaded. So you can view your conversation as a whole or you can view multiple conversations for your service request. And we built notifications to keep you aware of key events such as when your document has been assigned for examination or whether your document was approved for recordation. Next slide, please. As part of Recordation Modernization, one of the many paradigm shifts that we have is that the remitter will need to provide the indexing information for their document. This is something that the remitter has not previously done before. So in order to make sure the design is intuitive, we worked with our UX experts to help design and reimagine how the application was going to be laid out and organized. We had real remitters who volunteered their time to help us test the prototypes through usability testing sessions. And those took place during development. And one of the benefits of having that feedback early in the development process was that our team had the opportunity to implement the feedback and make adjustments as needed. So the content you see here is the application form we designed for the pilot. And we're still monitoring it now on how it's used as remitters are further putting it to the test with real documents and data. Two major elements on this page to highlight, you have the form itself, which incrementally loads and guides the users through the recordation process. And then you also have three types of help. The first is the in-line instruction giving the user a little bit of guidance without leaving the form. The second one is the flyout panel that comes out from the right. It's typically hidden until you press the Help icon. And it gives you a little bit more in-depth than the inline instruction. And last but not least, for the more inquisitive individual, we have links within the flyout that can take you to external sources so you can do a deep dive into the materials. For example, someone can read Section 205 of the Copyright Act if they wanted to by clicking the Section 205 link. Many of our users asked us to please use plain English when providing guidance. We hear you. And that's what we did. So our inline instructions and our flyouts are written in plain English as much as possible. And last but not least, we have the Application Progress Bar that tells you how far into the application you are. We found out through usability testing that users do not complete the submission process always in one fell swoop. So this progress bar gives you an idea of where to pick back up on when you revisit your draft submission. Next slide, please. We have the ability to manually add works to the document application. And oftentimes a document could have hundreds of works, if not more. So what we did was we included an upload functionality that allows users to use a spreadsheet template and inject all of their works at once through an upload feature. The template has been improved based on our remitter feedback, and we also have on-the-spot data validation for this upload feature. So errors can be caught up front and corrected. The validator will not only tell you the error but offer suggestions on how to resolve the issue. Next slide, please. There are two form of online payment that you can do through the pilot. You can go through the Department of Treasury's Pay.gov interface and deposit account if you have one associated under your account profile. You can review your application for all the information you've provided so far. But it also gives you a preview of what your public record will look like if your document is approved for recordation. The preview is not the actual public record. But it's just another view so that you have the opportunity to make corrections as needed before you submit. We still handle special handling requests as well. We've illustrated a fee breakdown for anyone who would like to know what all contributed to the total fee. And last but not least I want to point this out that we have an electronic signature box, which makes the entire submission process an online process. Next slide, please. We also have the application review page for the users. This page is accessible at any time. And it'll show slightly different types of information depending on what status or stage your application or service request has been. The most important part of this page that I want to point out is the centralized list of all the files that's related to your submitted application and document. You'll have a read-only view of the application. You'll also get access to all of the items that you've uploaded as part of your submission, which includes the document itself or any supporting documentation that you may have provided. And depending on where the application is or whether it's been approved for recordation, you might either see a preview link of the public record, or if your document is recorded, this is where you're going to find your digital numbered document and the Certificate of Recordation issued by the Copyright Office. Next slide, please. So of course, streaming the Recordation Process would also mean that we need to look at our internal application as well. So what you see here is the Recordation workspace, which is the internal-facing application. Actions that the staff members provide on this side of the application is actually linked to the portal. So the progress of examination is tracked and mapped to the status updates that the remitter sees on their side. We also built in case management and assignment algorithms, where all of the sorting and assignment routing is done by the system. We have a messaging center that's linked to the external messaging center. And there are workload management capabilities for the supervisors. Next slide, please. So this wraps up some of the major features that we've released as part of the initial release of the pilot. So let's take a look at the pilot program participants. Currently, we are inviting users into the pilot system in waves. This allows the Office to sufficiently monitor and gauge how we're doing and being able to support the users as we incrementally add them in. We've distributed invitations to a representative sample of our users. We looked at a number of selection criteria, some of which include documents and titles submitted over the past two years and industry categories from the user outreach that was conducted in 2018. If this seems really exciting for you and you would like to be considered for the pilot, please reach out to us at Recordation-Pilot@copyright.gov. Next slide, please. So what we have out right now is just the initial release. We have a lot more work ahead of us before the system is ready for prime time. We will be continuing to develop more features in an interactive manner throughout the pilot period. We have a lot of items in our pipeline. To name a few, we are planning to collect and address feedback that we receive from the pilot users. We'll still continue to do our user research activities and our collaboration with all of our stakeholders and users for usability testing sessions as we design more functionalities. Earlier, I mentioned that the pilot application is limited to Section 205 complete in English only. So we still have more Section 205 documents to go, specifically pertaining to Redactions and non-English documents. We'll be tackling Notices of Termination as well as looking at a paper submission path for recording documents. We'll have a lot of copyright applications coming up as they modernize. So we'll be continuously integrating with them. And you'll hear about some in a little bit. And I'm out of time. But there's a lot more features coming as we continuously build towards the full public release. Next slide, please. So thanks for tuning in and seeing what we've done for Recordation Modernization so far. I'll hand it off to Shawn and Carlos to talk about some of the exciting developments of Public Record Modernization. >> Thank you so much, KanKan. And thank you, David. We're getting lots of great questions pouring in. and I know I said we were going to save them all for the end of the presentations. But I did want to share an answer to several questions partway through, which is that we are going to post slides on the Copyright Modernization website that Maria showed earlier. So for those who have asked how they can get the slides, that'll be the place where you can get them. Our next two presenters, as KanKan mentioned, are another pair that are a Product Owner and a User Experience Designer. Shawn Gallagher from the U.S. Copyright Office is the Product Owner for the Public Records System. And he'll be joined by Carlos Alvarado from OCIO. Shawn, take it away. >> Thanks, David. Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us. I'm going to run you through a quick demo of our new Public Records System. And then I'll hand it off to Carlos to talk a little bit more about the user experience. So similar to Recordation, I just wanted to give you a quick background on the Copyright Office Public Records. So, you know, we have authority through Title 17, Specifically Section 705 and 707. 705 refers to the maintenance of an index that will be open for public inspection. And 707 refers to the authority to publish catalogs of copyright registrations and the discretion to determine the form of those publications. So what does that mean in the current world of electronic records? So the existing online public catalog is available on the Copyright Office's website. And that contains records related to registrations and recorded documents after 1978. Paper copies of records before that can be accessed physically on-site at the Copyright Office in Washington D.C. when that is available to be open to the public. So in practice, the Copyright Office has the most extensive collection of copyright records. And those records allow people to identify copyright status or ownership and provide notices of transfer of copyright ownership and constructed notice. So on the next slide, you'll see a little bit about how the Office first began issuing those public records, again, the Copyright Record Books, which are contained in our offices in Washington D.C., over 26,000 volumes that include a broad array of our records. There's also the Copyright Card Catalog, which has over 41.5 million card images and is actually also available online now. Those are digitized and up online to browse and filter, as well as the Catalog of Copyright Entries, which were sent out to deposit libraries around the country to help make copies of the Registration Index available around the U.S. So moving away from the paper world, the Copyright Office first started off in 1978 with a COPICS system that you can see there on the left, which was a pretty rudimentary way to display electronic records. It didn't offer a keyword search option. Searches were left to match by name and title only. And there were three separate databases that it pulled from. On the right-hand side, you'll see a screenshot from our current public catalog offering that you can find on the Copyright website. This has all the record types combined into one database. And there are some additional search options such as keyword. There are some basic filters and limits available. So it was an improvement from the COPICS system. But we decided that we'd used that system long enough. And we'd like to move on to create something a little bit more user friendly. The next slide will outline some of the feedback that we've used over the past number of years to inform the development of the system we've been working on for the past year, a number of surveys and reports that were issued. We've taken recommendations and consideration from a lot of those issues to help us develop requirements for this new system. So just in case you've forgotten, the Current Public Catalog. That's a snapshot of what it looks like there on the right-hand side. It's got a bit of an updated interface. There's some very strict formatting that we've heard a lot of feedback from users about when you're searching for registration or recorded document numbers. You need to use leading zeros. And you have to be very specific about the order of the information as you're inputting it into the fields to search. There's a 10,000 result search limit. And while this is a useful database to help find information, it's not copyright specific. And so it doesn't have easy ways to search for information that's most relevant to the copyright community. So this is the new, more modern interface that we're designing for our Public Records System. We've included some flexible formatting so you don't have to worry about leading zeros anymore when you're searching for registration numbers and making sure that you have 13 characters in that search when you're inputting it. We have some advanced search features we'll be showing you in a bit. We have dynamic filters to help you narrow down your results more quickly and easily. And there is a focus on copyright information. So you're able to search for copyright-specific information such as registration numbers, claimants, Party 1, Party 2, that sort of thing that's a little bit more specific than you would find in a library indexing system. So diving in, the first example right here -- oh, I see that we lost all of our slide builds. So this is a search for a book called Goodnight iPad that the Library of Congress recently referenced in a message to the staff. And she noted in her message that the title is Goodnight iPad. And it was written by Ann Droyd, which I'm sure most of you can understand is a parody or a pseudonym. But when we look in the public record, we'll see after we perform a basic search, each one of our search results on this page includes a Full Title, a Registration Number, in the case for our registration, along with Registration Date, the type of work, and the Claimant, we see, is David Milgram. So clicking into that result, on the next slide, we'll show you the Record Detail Page, which up on the top you'll see the Registration information, the title. And then as we move down towards the bottom, we have a name section, where we've grouped information of like together to make it a little bit more easy to find the information that should be grouped together in an intelligible way for the public record. And here you'll see that under the Authorship on Application, we do have Ann Droyd listed as a pseudonymous name for David Milgram, who is actually the claimant and the author. So moving on to the next slide here, we're going to go off of the example for Game of Thrones that we used earlier. So typing in Game of Thrones up on the top and I think Martin in there as well. We're able to execute a search. And then we can use some of the filters, the date filters over on the right-hand side, to adjust the date for the search for those records. What's not outlined here in this demo is the ability to search for different types of dates depending on the record that you're searching for. If you specific a registration, you can also search by effective date of registration, date of publication, or date of creation. And if you're searching for recorded documents, you can search by data recordation or data certification. Not specifying any one of those searches all of the dates within a record. So we'll see that we did come back with a title for Game of Thrones with a Registration Number, the Date, and the Type of Work. Now once you've searched for your results -- it's okay. You can go back to the next slide -- you'll see on the right-hand panel along with your search results, we have a set of filters and facets that you can use to narrow your results. So in this case, we can narrow our initial set of search results by Registration Records and then by text as well. So we can narrow by Record Type. And then as we've chosen Registration Records, we can narrow by Registration subclasses and also Registration Item Types. So narrowing by both of those, that takes us to the next slide, which shows the record for Game of Thrones for George R. R. Martin. That's the original registration. And again we've grouped the Title information and the Registration information. We've grouped the dates together. And we've grouped some of the names together as well and the descriptive information such as the pages, the in print, and publisher location. So moving on to the next slide, again if we wanted to try to look for recorded documents, which were referred to earlier in the presentation, we can deselect the Registration and select Recordation in our facets over on the right-hand side. And in addition to the recorded documents that we found in the presentation earlier about the assignment in 2009, this is actually returning us a Memorandum of Exclusive Rights that was in 2008, so before that assignment actually happened. So you have a wealth of recorded documents here that we can find within the system. And then if we click into there, we see that Party 1 is George Martin. Party 2 is HBO. And clicking into that results, on the next slide, will show us the Record Detail Page as well. And we have a little floating box there where we can see that the concerned parties are listed as George R. R. Martin as Party 1 and HBO is listed as Party 2. So moving on to the ability to sort by title and date, I'm sure this is something that everyone expects to see in any kind of modern search system. So if we're searching for Jason Reynolds here, who is the Youth Ambassador to Literature for the Library of Congress, we'll see a number of results here. The top results when we first search is a little bit older than I think Jason Reynolds recent collections are. So clicking on the sort button over on the right-hand side, we can sort by alphabetical. We can sort by dates. And so sorting by dates will bring up his more recent works to the top of the search results. And so we'll see Sunny, Lu, all the way down some of his more recent works available in that search view. Now we did have more than 10 results for Jason Reynolds. So going down to the bottom of those results, pretty much like any other page that you probably expect to find, you can adjust the items per page there between 10 and 100 to more easily page through your results. And you can also switch through the different pages of your results there as well and even jump to a specific page, if you have a large amount of results. So again, I mentioned that flexible formatting that people were asking us about. This is an example of a search for A History of Reading. And so on the left-hand side, we've entered the traditional value with that leading zeroes. So it's the TX. And we've got three leading zeroes there. And then the registration number. And that returns the correct results. But you can also enter that as you may see it on a Registration Certificate with a hyphen in there and maybe there's a space. So when you're searching for these Registration Numbers and Recorded Document Numbers, you can search by those directly from our basic search. And formatting isn't an issue. And it should return results no matter what format you enter those numbers in. Again, on the next slide, a similar thing for standard identifiers. We had a number of requests to be able to search for standard identifiers, such as ISBN numbers. And again this is illustrating that on the left and on the right we're searching for When Books Went to War by the ISBN number. The number on the left is the ISBN-13. And the number on the right is the ISBN-10. Both of those return the exact same result. And if we click into those initial search results, I think we'll see on the next slide, we see the Record Detail Page with a highlight of the ISBN number blown up to make it a little bit easier to read on these slides so you can see that it does indeed appear in the standard numbers, standard identifiers section, where you'd expect to see it. So those are some of the features of our basic search. And moving on to the advanced search, we know that we do have a number of power users that they use our catalog search for information. And I'm a little bit disappointed we don't have the build slide here because where you see the field heading with keyword, that's kind of a key component. as you click on that, it expands down what we've called the mini mega menu. And that allows you to search for all names. It allows you to search for Party 1, Party 2. It allows you to search for Registration Number or Recorded Document Number. You can search for Claimant. You can search all standard identifiers or you can specify if you're looking individually for an ISBN or an ISMN, that sort of number. So I'm sorry that that got left out of this presentation. But we will hopefully be able to show that to you one more time. And if you actually want to go back to look at the Copyright Modernization webinar, you might be able to catch a little bit more detail on those slides there. What you are seeing is some of the different search types that we're providing. So Contains looks for that field anywhere within the field that you're looking for. Is Exact, it kind of works as you may expect. So that looks for an exact phrase. And then Stars With works very similar to a left-anchored search or a left-match search, if you're familiar with those terms from the library world, to help you find items that start with your term. But there may be separate, different endings or longer titles that you may be looking for. But you just want to start off with a very general search. So moving on quickly to some of the combined, the Boolean searches that we have. So we can do a quick advanced search, searching the title for Hunger Games and then the claimant for Collins. And then we'll see that our search results do return us the Registration for Hunger Games with the claimant of Suzanne Collins. So we think this is going to be really helpful to allow people to search specific data fields within our records quite easily from this advanced search menu. Some of the things that we're working on for our next steps, we're looking at the ability to take actions on some of these records, such as emailing them, formatting them for print, and being able to share those things quickly and easily with others. We are also looking at being able to display recent searchers and recent records that you may have viewed during your session. I think those are possibly highlighted on the next slide. I think those were a build as well. So we may have lost those highlights. But you'll see in the upper right-hand side, there is recent searches button and a recent records button that you can click on to see the recent records and to see recent searches that you performed within your session. You'll also see in the upper right-hand corner that there is a little account button. We're envisioning the ability for external folks to be able to create an account, to be able to save those recent searches, and to be able to go back and revisit those later, as well as to hold on to records that may be of importance to you or that you may need to access frequently. So addition to those features that we're working on for our upcoming release, we're also considering adding other features that we've heard people ask for such as linking registrations and recorded documents, providing additional indexing information captured by the new Recordation Pilot, including pre-'78 records as they are digitized by the Office and become available and perhaps including metadata and card images from the Virtual Card Catalog, which is already up online. We've also had a number of requests to display the certificates of recorded document image. And that's something the Office I also considering as well for the Public Record. So that's it for the demo. I'd like to hand it over to my colleague, Carlos Alvarado, to discuss how the Public Record Project has benefit from User Experience Design. >> Thank you, Shawn. We're going to talk a bit about some of the user experience research and method we've employed in the Public Records Modernization Project. But first I just want to say a few words about the team mindset that allows us to successfully build a system that caters to our user needs, you know. It's easy as a UX designer to say we're putting our users first. But what does that really mean? For our team, it meant focusing on creating an environment early on that not only put our users at the center of the design process but made it okay to iterate our initial assumptions and designs as we've learned more throughout the user experience research process. And, of course, to begin with, we had to define what our problem was. Certainly, the current system is lacking some of the modern search functionality we're all accustomed to. But we had to dig a little deeper than that. What are our user pain points? What are their workflow issues? And how can we frame these problems our users are having within the project to allow us to hypothesize a solution that we can test and iterate on as we expand our knowledge? I mean, after all, what we're really trying to accomplish here is to allow people to intuitively conduct research and create a system that makes the discovery process easy. Go to the next slide. So how do we learn from our users, you know? Early on in the Public Records Project, we began by reaching out to internal staff to understand not just how they perform searches but why they perform certain searches. What are their end goals? What types of requests are common from the public? And what are some of their roadblocks? We continued interviews and contextually inquiries, where we just sat down with users and watched them perform their job to begin to analyze their workflow and recognize some of their pain points. All of this preliminary research really helped us build a great baseline level of knowledge that we use to design potential workflow improvements for our researchers in the new system. So we're not just really following design trends here. Instead what we're doing is we're making informed design decisions based on our own research that we're conducting with our users to serve their particular needs. Go to the next slide, please. So a real small example of this is that through those interviews and contextual inquiries where we really just talked to people and had conversations and posed relevant questions, we learned that a typical internal research strategy is to cast a wide net and then begin to narrow down those results because researchers wanted to ensure that no potential records were missing because of a slight change or spelling in the author name or claimant name. So of course, we kept that in mind as we built the new system and created an intuitive and comprehensive filtering component that allows users to refine their initial set of search results, as you can see here on the right. Go on to the next one. So another method we used early on to get a handle on representing data on a Public Record Detail Page was a card sorting activity. So in various sessions, we took every single possible label for Registration and Recordation Records and asked subject matter experts to group those labels in whichever order made sense to them. Now this type of exercise, there really is no right or wrong answers. However, what does begin to happen is that after about 15 or so users, trends begin to develop. And you can make informed design decisions on how you should group information together. This is a really great exercise to do in person. You get to hear users problem solve out loud. And you start understanding and building knowledge on how they perceive information. But, of course, part of any Agile project like this, you have to remain flexible. And as a team, I think we did a really great job of that in our new virtual work reality. Shawn and I were able to host a number of card sorting sessions through the use of a web-based application. Now conducting these sessions virtually has its own set of benefits such as providing useful metrics and graphs that you can see here on the screen, which helped the team visualize the connections users are making with bits of information. So as you can see here in this matrix, the dark blue areas represent labels that show a high tendency to be grouped together. And we can go to the next slide. So once the results of the card sort were analyzed and revised, we were able to develop a Detailed Record Page for the new system. Again, this is research-based design decisions. We can see here on the left the current system displays information about a record within the Detail Record Page in a long list. What we found through multiple conversations with our users was that this list seemed to be ordered arbitrarily. So we took that user research from the card sort and created groups for all the labels for each record type, Registration and Recordation, and created a cleaner, more easily scannable page. We can go to the next slide. Thank you. And I'm also really excited to report that we just wrapped up some remote moderated usability testing with internal users. During these sessions, we asked the users to go through a series of tasks to test the system's usability. As they went through these tasks, we also asked them to talk out loud in order to help us understand their thought process as they moved within the system. This method really helped us gain an incredible amount of insight on what was working for our users and what wasn't. Go to the next slide, please. One of the insights we gathered from testing helped us rethink how we represent our search results. It became apparent fairly quickly that users expected that when they search under a specific field heading such as author, that this label would be returned with their results. Now the initial iteration of the application only returned five standard labels. In this case, for a Registration record, that's Full Title, Registration Number, Date, Type of Work, and Claimant. But we realized this wasn't quite meeting our user expectations. Go to the next slide. So as you can see here, the second record on this set of search results has no mention of the search term Paul French. In fact, the author field isn't visible as well. But even though the user has specifically searched within this field, you cannot see the author field within the search results. But to resolve this potential confusion as to why a user may receive certain results, we began iterating on our designs in the search results page in order to make it more intuitive to our user. Our current but by no means final iteration to solve this issue is to make it explicit to our users by adding another small section underneath the standard labels, which explains where your search term is found within the record. So in this example that we were just talking about, to try to eliminate any confusion, the author detail is now displayed below. And the search term Paul French is highlighted. Now, of course, this is something we plan to continue to iterate on and test again to ensure that we have the most appropriate solution for our user. And if we go to the last side, thank you. So finally I just want to wrap up by saying the initial release of the Public Records System is scheduled for Fall 2020. But the current Public Record System is not going away any time soon. So you can still certainly use that. But we hope the public begins leveraging the new system. And you can provide us with feedback with the email you see on the screen here, publicrecords@copyright.gov. And we also plan to expand usability testing with external users. So if you'd like to be part of that, please feel free to reach out to us as well. We really do welcome every opportunity we have to improve this system further by engaging with our users. Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Shawn, and thank you, Carlos. I'm really excited that we're rolling this out soon. Our next and final presentation for this portion of the program is led by Rob Kasunic, Associate Register of Copyrights and Director of Registration Policy and Practice. Rob will be joined by Natalie Buda Smith, whom you already heard from earlier. And at the end of this final session, we'll move into the Question and Answer Period. We've already seen quite a few questions coming in. Keep them coming. And we'll be getting to you soon. >> Thank you, David. And good morning, everyone. The goal of Registration Modernization is not simply to update our current system but to completely reimagine and to replace that system with a new user-friendly, user-centric system that incorporates web norms and a common design system that is consistent across the Enterprise Copyright System. We've spent many years updating and improving public information about Registration with the revision of our over 1200-page compendium of United States Copyright Office Practices, our information circulars, our Frequently Asked Questions and videos. But we recognize that the optimal way to inform and assistant applicants is to provide targeted assistance and multiple levels of assistance throughout the application process itself. This will not only help applications navigate Copyright Office Registration options. But it'll provide multiple levels of assistance to users of the system throughout that registration process. In this way, our goal is to foster increased registration by creators and owners of copyrighted works, reduce the number of errors that we currently see in applications, and reduce the need for correspondence from the Office to correct errors and resolve inconsistencies with the in applications. Unlike some of the systems that you have just reviewed, we are currently just beginning development of this new Registration System. But we have been engaged for many Registration Modernization activities over the last few years. So in the fall of 2017, we began extensive user research through in-person interviews with users of our system around the country, surveys, and testing of initial prototypes based on findings from that user research. As you can see from the photograph of our feedback wall, we documented all of this feedback that we received through those surveys and interviews and organized all of the research we obtained to guide our efforts. It's also important to recognize that we in the office also contributed over a decade's worth of experience and feedback that we had obtained through our daily interaction with users of the current ecosystem and the desires for functionality that did not exist or assistance that did not exist within that system. Next slide, please. We also, in addition to the external user research for the public-facing side of the new system, we spent much of the last year planning, envisioning the internal user experience for United States Copyright Office Examiners, Supervisors, and Managers. We had many working group sessions throughout this last year engaging all staff to brainstorm and come up with new ways to increase efficiency within the Office and make the experience of interacting with applicants more efficient. Next slide, please. We also over the last year were engaged in a foundational development effort to begin developing basic production-quality code related to common data points that will be required in the new system. Those data points will also be helpful for developing the internal side of the system as we begin the full development effort. This effort also was a means of training Registration staff how to work in the scrum team on Agile sprints and to accomplish specific goals within those time periods. This effort provided us with the ability to hit the ground running as we begin the development process for Registration. Next slide, please. One more slide. And as Maria had mentioned earlier, the Office has been engaged across the board in extensive work on business process reengineering. Registration Staff engaged in a large number of facilitated workshops to identify pain points in the registration process and to brainstorm options to address those problems and to improve the efficiencies. While this effort was not limited to IT-related solutions, we did find that a large number of the current pain points that we experienced could be resolved through technical improvements in the new system. Next slide, please. In conjunction with all of these efforts, we have also worked closely with the Office of the General Counsel and the Office of Public Information and Education to ensure public input through federal register notices and comments from the public. We sought input on a wide variety of topics and intend to continue this method of feedback throughout the Registration Modernization Process. And as you can see, some of the key elements that we explored through this notice and comment process including help tools and questions about application fields, APIs, in-process corrections were all a part of the feedback we received through this process and look forward to continuing. Next slide, please. We are now beginning development of the reimagined Standard Application flow and the internal system for the staff. This process is going to be an iterative process. As Sarah had mentioned earlier, we are going to be working on a prototype initially for the standard application, which currently involves about 75% of all of the 500,000 applications we receive every year. And so really getting information and prototype, clickable prototype testing for that application will be critical to success for a re-envisioned Registration System. And with that I'm going to turn it over to Natalie Buda Smith to talk about the user experience design more. >> Thanks, Rob. Next slide, please. As Rob has discussed, as part of the revisioning, we have conducted many types of user research with both internal and external users, as the internal experience of examination and processing is just as important and there's actually dependency. So Registration is the most important service of the ecosystem. So much time and effort is being placed on making the experience as straightforward as possible. This work also includes meeting the requirements of the law, which does change. So the service needs to be flexible enough to make these changes. And since the U.S. Copyright Service can't offer legal advice to applicants, Help is an essential part of making the Modernized Registration Service a success. Wes Lindenmud [assumed spelling], Lead User Experience Designer for Registration, shepherding the team in the design and development of a system that will offer help and guidance, help in the context of using the online services with three tiers of help. The first level of help is in-line guidance, so that users can receive help at the point that the help is needed. For example, offering help when entering information in a field so that they are not overwhelmed with information before they need that specific help. If they want more information about what is being requested, they can find it when they need it. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. Thanks. The second level of help is through information flyouts that are tailored to the specific section, the section the user is currently using. This information is based on commonly asked questions or issues for that section and will contain links to a authoritative research resources. It will have rich and concise guidance that can be opened and closed so that it doesn't distract a user from the task at hand. Next slide, please. The third level of help will be guided walkthroughs of topics that include questionnaires, questionnaires that assist in winnowing down a large topic to the user-specific issue. This helps in creating an experience that does not overwhelm and makes the complex process of registering work as accessible and straightforward as possible. Next slide, please. As mentioned before, the external staff experience is just as important as the external experience as the two are dependent on each other. One example of this dependency is a communication between the examiner and the submitter. This is a screenshot of the current experience for internal staff pre-modernization. As you can see, the usable screen real estate is poorly distributed. And the size of the fields to enter crucial information are very limited and hard to use. Over time and over many submissions, this work becomes very taxing. Next slide, please. In order to improve the experience for examiners, the extended team conducted user research with multiple types of examiners, supervisors, and managers throughout the Registration Office to create an experience that was less taxing and addressed examiner-specific needs, the need to be more efficient, flexible and organized for their specific preferences. This new experience includes the ability to create and tag items, search in ways that are more aligned with an individual examiner's work, clearly visible buttons and other interactive elements that look like other products they use every day, and a responsive and less taxing workspace. This is an example of a screenshot of the internal staff experience under design that illustrates a large shift for the internal staff by prioritizing their needs and the ways that they want to work. Next slide, thank you. Continuous user research is also being conducted with Registration. User research is currently being conducted in the formative stages so that design can be improved before code is created. We're testing with low fidelity wireframes, including the parts of forms for registration submission, such as with this form that collects information from an external user about an author. Next screen, next slide, please. From low fidelity wireframes, we create targeted prototypes, which allow us to test and get feedback on the interactive elements and the flow of screens from one task to another task. This is an example of an interactive prototype we used to get feedback from examiners on how they would like to sort, filter, and search submissions. We then modified the design as needed and then created user stories that were entered into sprints for the scrum team to work. From low fidelity wireframes and targeted prototypes, higher fidelity wireframes are created. And prototypes are developed to get additional feedback on screens that are closer to the end state of registration. All these work products are in continuous discussion in collaboration with the entire team, the entire team business owners, designers, developers, testers, security and accessibility experts in more work in the daily scrub to refine, build and grow with a user, both external and internal users who are the heart of their work. Next, Rob will discuss the next steps for registration. Thank you, Natalie. And yes, we're in for this fall. And towards the end of the calendar year, we are going to be working towards creating a limited clickable prototype for the standard application. We have already begun some of the initial efforts for that and are going to be looking to identify novice users of the system as well as experience users to begin to test some of the ways we're going to be approaching the standard application and obtain feedback on which to iterate on that. And this process of using a clickable prototype is, in a sense an intermediary process before getting to a pilot stage based on coded development effort, we want to make sure that we have the right approach and have user feedback and user guidance and validation prior to having developed actual code in in the external side of the system, so this is going to be important guidance that we intend to incorporate into our development efforts or the standard application as well as for the coming years when we will be moving towards all of the other many applications that are involved within the registration system, including the supplemental registrations and all the group registration options, as well as looking at new ways of handling some of those, some of those multiple work applications. So with that, we look forward to any questions that you have. And I'll turn it back to David. Thank you. Thank you so much, Rob. And thank you, Natalie. For those who are following along at home, we have had some audio artifacts coming through but it seems to have cleared up now. There will be slides posted as has been mentioned previously for those if anyone missed anything. We're going to start fielding questions now. And as a reminder, questions will be answered and in one of three way fielded in one of three ways either verbally with the In the session or in writing in the q&a, Question and Answer panel, or in some cases and writing directly to the person who has posed the question. And there have been quite a few questions that are substantially similar in scope. And in that case, I've tried to combine questions that I would remind people that you that the ability to answer to get questions answered directly via ask Sam o continues to be a possibility. So for the first set of questions, I've I've lumped together seven questions that we got from respondents that come into the broad category of how do I get in more involved in this process? and Maria, if you would take a first crack at that. I'd appreciate it. Um, no, thank you, David. And thanks, everybody for your questions and participation. I think there are several ways in which you can get more information and ways in which you can learn more about participating. I mean, please start with our website. Copyright. gov. On that homepage, you will see our copyright modernization page. And that's where the slide I showed earlier in this presentation. On the homepage, if you go to the bottom of the page, there's a bar where you can subscribe to a variety of the copyright offices, ongoing information, including our web, our news nets, as well as information, some of our other things such as our blogs, so I highly encourage everyone to sign up for that subscription service. On that way you can keep track of everything that we're doing in the Copyright Office, including on it modernization, as David mentioned, in terms of specific questions are asked cmo@copyright.gov email is the best place to ask a centralized question about it modernization and that way we can respond in the appropriate manner with respect to the How to participate in recreation pilot that can can we're speaking about earlier that addresses recreation hyphen pilot@copyright.gov. If you're interested in learning more information about the public record, as Sean said, That's public records@copyright.gov. On as we also heard some of these systems that we've been laying out where the subjects of a prior webinars that we did, for example, on user design on our business intelligence tool, and on the recommendation pilot, so if you want to see some of our archived materials, that's a place to to look as well. We also had a question I believe about what's next with respect to the this public stakeholder Working Group. As I mentioned at the beginning, the office will be issuing some public guidance on how that process will be started later this summer. And that way, we'll be able to use the fall in order to identify members of that working group so that we're ready to go by the time for our next public forum, which is On January of 2021, I would also like to say I hope you're seeing from the seminar former that this is a tremendous effort across multiple staffs. And I, I do want to thank everybody who's participated not only in this forum, but all of the staffs who've been working as subject matter experts, as participants. We have to do our day jobs. We also were doing monetization and a lot of work streams that I really want folks to understand that this is a tremendous undertaking and their work is very much appreciated. I turn it back to David, thank you. Thank you so much, Maria. It's very much appreciated, and please keep the questions coming for those who who are who are still listening in and the the next question that we have is a question for the CIO, which is what other e commerce platforms have similar size and scope, the library's Chief Information Office developed and how is it learn from those projects, developing the ECS and If you take a first crack at that, sure, I'll give that a shot. Appreciate the question. The thing has got me a little wandering here is similar scope and size. You know, the cuprate ecosystem is such a huge part of the US economy. I'm not sure that there is a comparable size and scope effort inside of the legislative branch anyway, or even the executive branch in the government side. But we have a lot of experience with financial management systems, a lot of experience with interfaces between financial management systems, and accepting funding and making sure funding is accounted for. For those who may not be aware, we do have the federal Library Information Network fedlink that the library manages, which is a nice commerce site. We also host the legislative branch financial management system, which is responsible for all of the funding countability for budgets regarding the legislative branch agencies. So all the agencies within legislative branch, there may be one exception, use our financial management system within the library. That being said, we are constantly working with industry experts on what is the best and most secure way to manage e commerce as we proceed with the copyright modernization efforts. And if anyone has any specific standards or questions that they'd like us to drill down into, we'd be happy to do that in a more detailed manner offline. Thank you so much, but the next question is directly to one of our panelists, which is for Natalie Buda Smith. Your user experience process sounds very integrated. Can you share the methods and tools you have been most successful using during our current environment, ie not able to have in person meetings? Yes, not being able to have in person meetings is extremely challenging, challenging. Luckily, we were able to scale, try to scale some methods to scale and we're working in a scaled method before we all left the library. So we had some experience that we could draw from and while we were all working remotely, I would say at the heart of this collaborative, working collaboratively with the Extended product teams is really it has really been the design system. Our design system is based off the US web design system, which is a really great design system. And we took that and modified it to meet the US copyright offices needs, and use that as a tool to collaborate with the extended product teams. So our user experience designers will pull components from the design system, bring them into the daily Scrum, have discussions, make modifications, and then put them back into the design system. And we have our accessibility experts and our security experts reviewing our components as well to make sure that we're adhering to other standards. So at the heart of collaboration has been the use of a design system that is online, and also our online tools where we actually go Room sprints, write user stories collaborate on user stories both synchronously and asynchronously. So that people who are maybe not able to be together for extended periods of time can add to the conversation or build off of conversation. So our online tools in our design system have been essential to scaling and collaborating, especially at this time. Thank you, Natalie. And while you're still unmuted, I have a short follow up to add to the design system, which is will users of the system have customization and options within the system? Or will it be one size fits all based on the UX study? So our design system is a tool for our design and development teams. And that is a repository of shared components that you will see manifest in the external interfaces and for internal staff internally Staff for the examination and processing of these submissions really need to be able to tailor their workspaces in order to manage their work to the way that they work best. There are different types of examiner's and different types of internal staff to help with the processing. So, because they have different ways to work in different parts of the system to focus on that is the ability to customize their workspaces. It was highly prioritized for them, then our external users, we are at this time really prioritizing how do we make these complex processes as straightforward and easy to use as possible. So some of these services may have ways to accommodate preferences as we grow and evolve. And that will manifest and later versions of that but that that is something that We are trying to build into the process as we iterate and as it makes sense for the different type of users. Thank you, Natalie. That's so helpful. So we have a lot of questions still coming in. And we're at about our 15 Minute Warning. I'm going to group together a couple of questions about specific features. So the specific features questions we've had, we've got about 11 or 12 of them so far, and I'd like to hand off briefly to Ken can, and Shawn, the two product owners who are on the team to talk about how specific feature requests get prioritized, and I would remind the attendees that the development for all of these projects is largely in the future and it's being done in an agile and iterative way. And that you can still send suggestions for specific features that are important to you via all the ways that Maria I mentioned earlier, Ken, Ken, and then Shawn, can you talk about some of the questions that we've gotten specifically about in process recommendations and about advanced search specific advanced search features that you've seen? Go ahead, Ken, Ken. And Ken, Ken, we're not hearing you. If you're on mute, you'll have to unmute. And if you can't hear us, either. We'll hand it over to Shawn. Hey, David. So I heard there we go. And there was the first question about addressing the feedback that we receive and how it gets integrated into our development. That's right when we get specific feature requests for some and one specific feature request has been mentioned twice, is pending recommendations. So generally what we do is we have a lot of channels that are taking in feature requests we have if you're participating in the pilot, you have to give feedback link. And also the recommendation dash pilot is a great way to reach out to us and request for features. And what we do as a team fairly regularly is we review all of the features requests that we get, and we prioritize them. We typically get things about bugs to address features to add or to consider. And we also have the features that we definitely need to build out just to get all of the recommendation products and services built by the full release. So we look at logical groupings and look at made but there's a lot of factors that we evaluate and we start grouping them into spring. And then once what we do is we work with our usability experts and start, start the analysis process. We get our development team involved, and we go from there. But this is a continuous process that happens. So please reach out to us if you have ideas. Thanks, Ken. Can that's very helpful. Shawn. There were two specific questions about features for the public record system, one about how many rows can be added to Advanced Search and another about whether there would be an API in any of the planning stages, if you could provide any additional details about how the future requests get prioritized. And if it's any different than what Ken can just described, and maybe talk specifically about those two requests? Sure. So the the Advanced Search question is pretty easy to answer. In the in our current iteration, there's seven rows that you can add to that a Search when you're using the Boolean search that we showed there with the Hunger Games and Susan Collins example, to right now that seven as far as the API's go I know there's been some conversation about it. But I think we're waiting for the office to take an official stance on API's. And perhaps that's something that maybe Maria or someone from General Counsel would prefer to answer. It's something that we're not going to begin developing until I think the office takes an official stance on that. And then as far as feedback, I think I did see a couple questions that came in asking about some of the the design that we've seen, again, everything that we showed today, as a system that's under development, and as Carlos mentioned, we will be engaging in external usability testing, hopefully sometime in the next six to nine months. And so we do encourage, if people are interested in participating is send us an email to public records at copyright. gov, and you'll be considered for our usability testing once we do some of that outreach. Thanks, Shawn. So there are a number of additional questions related to the it secured the IT security system. It security of the system. And I'll just read two of them before I hand this off to Bob Barton, which are just how do you make sure these systems are secure? And can you tell us more about security obligations? But I think you answered some of these in your earlier remarks. And it's possible that we had someone joining later but if you could give a quick summary of a couple of those. Sure, happy to. So as I mentioned in the opening remarks, we are abiding by the NIST standards for government IT systems. We have a very significant push on security for the last four years or so. Congress has been very supportive in funding, better security for all of our sensitive data. And we have a lot of initiatives underway. The first thing that I'd like to point out from my perspective is that we are doing very detailed security reviews on all of our applications. And we do third party penetration testing on a regular basis. So, I, our chief information security officer, or Cisco is on the call with us though, I'll ask him if he would like to point out some of the standards and key features we use for securing data at rest and data in motion. And those types of things. Just briefly, that Shawn, link, Shawn. For some standards we use like for encryption, we follow the NIST FIPS 140 gription standard, Shawn, you're Shawn, your audio is a little bit faint. I don't know if it's possible to step a little closer to the mic. How does this There we go. Okay, much better. All right. Sorry about that. So we as I was saying, We you, we follow the NIST 142 standard where all the encryption has to be actually validated and certified by NIST. And that assures us that it's vetted and meets the government standard for encryption. Some of the other things we're actually rolling out now that we're looking at the cloud as well as you know, being connected to the internet is cloud application security broker, which will allow us to actually tag files such as copyrighted material, and put those hashes within our proxy and prevent those files. From the wind being sent to users who shouldn't have them, whether via email or through a cloud provider like g Drive or Dropbox. Thank you, Shawn. So we had several more specific feature questions that have come up specifically regarding the registration process. So I'll, I'll hand these off to rob cast. Nick. I will note before before handing off to rob that we're at the very beginning of the development of the registration product and many of the development decisions have not been have not been finalized. But the questions that we have seen asked are, one is put to us in the form of an assertion which is that a new registration application should include a navigation panel Going back to previous fields. Another is would questionnaires be available to help applicants with the confusing issue of whether a work is published. And the third is, is there any consideration of an API for industry to be able to connect directly to the system? Rob, if you could sort of take those questions as a group? I'd appreciate it. Thanks, David. Happy to. Yeah, with regard to the first question, regarding navigation, that's already been something that we have been looking into. I think we want to make sure that we have proper validations within required fields fields that we have to obtain information about to meet statutory obligations. But we certainly want to enable users to have flexible ability in the process to be able to navigate through that process. So that's something that we're definitely working on. And I have considered and have heard many times from users of the system. So we have that one covered. With respect to the question about difficult issues and including publication. I guess a couple thoughts on that. One is that we do have a, a notice on federal register notice notice of inquiry on publication, that we are reviewing comments that we've received from that notice, and we do the office intends to provide more, seeks to provide more information about publication to help the public and in regard to that, and what Natalie I don't know, I heard that the sound was champion different parts. So I don't know what portions of when who was talking might have been missed. But in incorporating multiple levels of help within the application itself, one of the the higher levels of assistance that we do intend and would like to include within the system is various tools that would allow users of the system who need more help beyond just being pointed to different parts of information we have, whether it be in the Compendium or questions, frequently asked questions that we're aware of, or specific parts of the application. We are planning to develop tools that can be used to on difficult issues such as publication work made for hire other areas where we are excited variance has shown that users of the system struggle with some of these terms of art within the copyright law, and to make answering those questions is helping applicants answer those questions. At the same time, finding the right balance so that we're not providing legal advice, which is always the challenge with some of those most difficult questions. So we are looking to trying to help applicants as much as possible. And I just realized I didn't write down the third question, David, could you remind me what that was? Actually, the the third question was whether there would be any consideration for industry to be able to connect directly to systems and I will just add, we're going to have one final question. When Rob finishes, we're at about three minutes left for the entire session. Okay, and Yeah, with API's essentially, yes. Right. With regard to API's that is something that we are definitely looking to incorporate into the system exactly when those aspects of the will be available within the system is it's likely going to be further down the road as we develop some of the basic features of new applications. But certainly having API's to be able to export data from from the public record, as well as being able to potentially import registration data and or various external entities to create to interrelate with the Copyright Office registration system and possibly other parts of the system are definitely something that we are expecting. To, to work on and are something that we've heard for many years are important and highly desired by users of the system. So we have noted that and are working hard to make sure that we're going to be able to incorporate those into a final system. Thanks, Rob. So our final question of the day is a question about the copyright offices use of data. And I'll hand this over to you, Maria. And if you want to make any closing remarks after the question, that would be welcome. You mentioned the use of data for decision making. Can you give an example of how that might work? And is the intention more toward internal decision making? Or do you imagine the modernization efforts to aid decision making on a larger external scale? Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the question. Um, and this is a reference to what I spoke about briefly, with respect to the work we're doing To support the modernization of our it tools, and this is our work on business intelligence, which is in the second basket of materials on our website. And so is, is driving a lot of what government agencies want to look at. We in the copyright office have a lot of data. However, under our current systems, that data is not readily accessible. due in part to some creaky systems. Our team in the copyright modernization office has been working diligently in their data section to build everything from data dictionaries, and they've we've been working on building a data analytics tool. And so we are nearing the completion of that building that tool. We actually had a webinar earlier this spring that went through in great detail the possibilities of what we could look at, for example, for internal purposes, we would be able using this tool to find a way to work organize the data to create specific dashboards for example, dashboards that might be able to effectively track of frustration processing time or source of registrations, the kind of information that would be very valuable to us in terms of the decision making, whether it's respect, staffing or funding or you know, make starting to make, you know, policy decisions going forward in the work that we need to do. So, data is important and this tool, it will help bridge the gap to make it in an accessible format for office use at this time. So with that, I will say thank you to everyone for participating and to my colleagues on the call. And you know, we look forward to hearing more of your comments. We're excited about, you know, the deliverables that we'll be able to make a very more public for public use in this calendar year. Thank you so much. Again, thank you everyone for joining us. Thank you to Maria strong and But Barton and all the panelists as well as everyone in this substantial audience for the time and attention today, and that includes our copyright it modernization cup public forum. Thank you for joining