Natalie Meyers
Artificial Intelligence Researcher in Residence
Association of Research Libraries/Coalition for Networked Information (2025–2026)
Abigail Haddad
Machine Learning Engineer & Data Scientist
Data Research Partners LLC
Gary Price
Editor/Consultant
infoDOCKET
Christopher Stephen Marcum
Consultant
Federation of American Scientists
Panelists will discuss the challenges faced in making sense out of public comments on regulations.gov submitted in response to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB’s) proposed revisions to the Uniform Guidance (OMB-2026-0034), a government-wide regulation that describes how federal grants, contracts, and awards are administered. The proposed regulation represents about 147 pages of changes to the previous guidance, a major overhaul to how federal grants that affect higher education, university libraries, labs, and other institutions are administered. The proposed revision received more than 150,000 comments from the public—far too many to read and analyze with traditional methods in a timely manner. To address this challenge, two independent teams developed comment analysis tools. One team generated early insights by pointing large language models at the comments as they were made available by OMB, and their work is accessible through a dashboard. Complementarily, focusing specifically on themes of interest to research libraries, another team developed and refined a pipeline to gather and analyze the comments and then layered a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server on top of the data to extend analysis and ad hoc reporting capabilities for users of artificial intelligence tools like Claude, Perplexity, and Warp. The discussants will present, compare, and contrast their data analysis pipelines and address best practices for submitting comments to a public docket.
