From their triumphant demo at the NY Tech Meetup during Internet Week to media accolades for ‘Senate 3.0′ in the New York Observer, the freshly relaunched NY State Senate website has made a pretty good impression.

Daylife is supporting the effort to modernize the site’s tools by upgrading a 30-year-old system for tracking news mentions of the NY State Senate. Until now the process was painfully analog: every day, staffers would spend hours physically cutting and pasting newspaper clippings and then mass-distribute photocopies to the Senate offices.

Seeing an opportunity to “bring the efficiency and cost savings of digital, while also standing up to the time-tested, well-loved offline newsclips,” the digital team enlisted the help of Daylife to bring the process into the 21st century.

NY Senate Chief Information Officer (CIO) Andrew Hoppin describes the new, updated system on his blog:

Using the Daylife service, a semantic news aggregator, the online Newsclips service is able to provide a rich summary of all the news articles from a targeted set of sources (say newspapers only in NY state) about a particular proper name or topic (“Malcolm A. Smith” or “MTA budget”). The service is presented as regularly-refreshed views of all 62 Senators, the other State executive offices, and a rich hierarchy of relevant topics. In addition, a fully interactive keyword search is also offered, in the style of LexisNexis or Google News, but limited to news sources relevant to the NY Senate constituencies.

The system is still in testing, but policy wonks and political junkies can experiment with the platform here.  Or learn more about the Daylife API, which powers the system.