diff --git a/DESCRIPTION b/DESCRIPTION
index f3ebf2be..194f92c4 100644
--- a/DESCRIPTION
+++ b/DESCRIPTION
@@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
 Package: soilDB
 Type: Package
 Title: Soil Database Interface
-Version: 2.2-9
-Date: 2018-11-16
+Version: 2.3
+Date: 2018-11-17
 Authors@R: c(person(given="Dylan", family="Beaudette", role = c("aut", "cre"), email = "dylan.beaudette@ca.usda.gov"), person(given="Jay", family="Skovlin", role = c("aut", "cre")), person(given="Stephen", family="Roecker", role = c("aut", "cre")) )
 Author: Dylan Beaudette [aut, cre], Jay Skovlin [aut, cre], Stephen Roecker [aut, cre]
 Maintainer: Dylan Beaudette <dylan.beaudette@ca.usda.gov>
diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index cc5cc143..fd0f3e36 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -1,6 +1,9 @@
--------------------------- soilDB 2.2-6 (2018-10-11) ------------------------------
+-------------------------- soilDB 2.3 (2018-11-17) ------------------------------
 * new function for exploring soil series co-occurrence data: siblings()
 * fetchOSD(..., extended=TRUE) gets competing soil series
+* new tests
+* removed old sample gSSURGO chunk and related documentation
+* release to CRAN
 
 -------------------------- soilDB 2.2-6 (2018-10-11) ------------------------------
 * new function for spatial queries: SDA_spatialQuery(), still needs testing and documentation