F e d e r a l D e p o s i t o r y L i b r a r y P r o g r a m ADMINISTRATIVE NOTES Newsletter of the Federal Depository Library Program ---------------------------------------------------------------------- November 15, 2000 GP 3.16/3-2:21/15 (Vol. 21, no. 15) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- GPO ACCESS UPDATE Remarks by T.C. Evans Assistant Director, Office of Electronic Information Dissemination Services Before the Federal Depository Conference and Fall 2000 Meeting of the Depository Library Council Arlington, VA October 23, 2000 It is always nice to have the opportunity to update you on the ever-changing state of GPO Access. As always, I want to publicly thank all of the hardworking people at GPO whose efforts to expand and improve our service provide me with this material. The challenges of developing and maintaining our ever-expanding electronic collection keep these hardworking individuals fully occupied and they deserve our thanks. Those of you who have heard me speak know how much I value user feedback. There will be several good opportunities during this conference to share your insights with us. On Tuesday afternoon at 2:00 there will be an open forum on GPO Access, and on Wednesday morning at 10:30 we will have an open discussion on evaluating our efforts to ensure that the pages of GPO Access are properly indexed by major search engines. In addition, please feel free to discuss your ideas for improving GPO Access with me anytime during the conference. Current Size GPO Access continues to grow and now houses almost 113,000 electronic titles and links to more than 80,000 others. This represents an increase of more than 20 percent for the fiscal year-to-date. There are more than 1,600 databases available on GPO Access, which is also a significant increase over the same time last year. System Performance Moving on to system performance, our efforts to provide the fastest possible response times continue. Utilization data indicates that the recent bandwidth increase has achieved the desired effect, with average daily peak usage for inbound and outbound packets running at just over 40 percent of capacity. Efforts are also underway to increase the performance of the server farm and to examine the possibility of establishing a remote mirror site at a GPO facility in the West. Usage Usage remains strong as an average of more than 26 million documents were downloaded from GPO Access each month during the last half of FY 2000. March saw an all time high of almost 29 million retrievals. Ben's Guide to U.S. Government for Kids continues to grow quickly. More than 3 million retrievals were recorded for Ben's Guide during its first ten months of operation, with September showing more than 400,000 retrievals as students returned to school. I would like to note at this point that we recently mounted a user survey on Ben's Guide and we hope you will take the opportunity to provide your comments. Over 100 responses were received in the first two days after the survey was posted. Referral Analysis Additional traffic from the many portals directing users to the resources of GPO Access is being felt and almost certainly will increase. With the advent of FirstGov, we have begun maintaining and analyzing referrer logs for GPO Access. The first 11 days worth of data revealed some interesting things, including a significant number of referrals from a wide variety of sites. For obvious reasons, the bulk of the referrals came from other pages on GPO Access. These were analyzed separately. As we suspected, we are getting a significant number of referrals from popular search engines, with some 14,000, or about 10 percent of the non-GPO Access referrals during this period. Google provided the most at almost 3,000, Yahoo approximately 1,500, and a number of others contributed lesser quantities. Somewhat surprising, however, was the fact that more than 32,000 referrals were received from Government Websites other than GPO. This represents over 23 percent of the non-GPO Access referrals and highlights how agencies are utilizing GPO Access resources to help both their internal and external constituencies. Another four percent of the non-GPO Access referrals, around 5000, came from Websites registered as educational institutions. While none had high individual totals, a large number of these sites contributed small numbers of referrals to GPO Access resources. The highest total during this period was produced by Ohio State University at 179, followed by the University of Chicago at 114, GPO Gate from the University of California system at 107, the University of Maryland at 106, and the University of Michigan at 97. The recently released FirstGov produced a total of 1,749 referrals, or about 1.3 percent of the non-GPO Access referrals. Of interest is that these referrals came from eleven distinct addresses which each take you to the FirstGov home page, indicating that these addresses are not redirections to the main site, but rather are separately available services. While this is encouraging, it should go higher as the FirstGov team refines their site. Based on our analysis of the site regarding its ability to direct users to the resources of GPO Access, there are a number of inconsistencies on FirstGov that will hopefully be fixed as the site matures. Problems exist in both their directory trees and in their search index which would make it difficult for average users to find their way to some of the official resources on GPO Access or that present other options first, some of which are not official Government sites. We will work with them on this in the same manner that we are working with other search engines to help them improve their abilities to link their users to the products and services of GPO Access. Performance Measures In conjunction with the Defense Technical Information Center and the Energy Information Administration, GPO helped fund a study to identify performance measures for Federal agency Websites. The study, led by Chuck McClure of Florida State University, was recently completed and is available on GPO Access (the address is included in the handout). While the full results are too lengthy to go into here today, you are welcome to examine it on your own. A wide range of agency approaches were identified in the study. GPO Access fared well in the review of current practices and the report even suggests that our strategy "could serve as a guideline for other agencies in establishing or amending their website development strategies." At the same time, there were some things pointed out that will help us in future evaluations of GPO Access. Of particular importance was a framework for considering performance measurement. This framework included: * Extensiveness - defined as the "amount or extent to which services are used." * Efficiency - defined as the "use of resources in providing services." * Effectiveness - defined as "how well the website meets the general governmental objectives and specific agency objectives." * Service quality - defined as "how well the website functions." * Usefulness - defined as "how well the website meets the needs of users." As you have already heard me say, we will be taking the opportunity to learn a great deal from you during this conference that will help answer the questions asked in this framework. Brown Study and GPO Access Brown University recently conducted a nationwide content analysis of state and Federal government Websites. Over 1,800 Websites were analyzed in this study, which searched each site for 27 different features. One of the main conclusions resulting from this study was that state and Federal government sites "do not make full, effective use of existing information technology." Using the 27 features set forth in the Brown Study as a guide, this report assesses how GPO Access compares to the sites analyzed. Main findings include: * GPO Access possessed 20 of the 27 features used by the Brown Study to assess government Websites, which gave GPO Access a 74% overall rating. * Compared to sites in the study, GPO Access was rated higher than many other Websites, including Thomas, which carried a 50% rating. * GPO Access faired very well against the Legislative sites analyzed in the Brown Study, possessing over 88% of the features used to analyze Legislative sites. In order to conduct a responsible analysis of GPO Access compared to the Brown Study, it is necessary to point out some areas in which we felt a different methodology would have produced a more useful result. * A clearer definition of each feature looked for in the study would have provided a better basis for understanding their conclusions. * Weighting the values of each feature relative to their importance to the overall success of a Government site would have generated a more meaningful end product. * Not all of the features measured may be essential measurements of a Government Website's success, depending on what that site exists to accomplish. * It would have been useful for all of the techniques to have been utilized in a similar manner so that the results could be viewed in a single table. GPO Access Training Hosts Needed As a result of the reduced funding for this year, it was necessary to look for ways to reduce our travel expenses for exhibiting at shows and providing GPO Access training classes. This will be accomplished by maximizing the benefits of each trip through offering to hold GPO Access training classes in cities in which we currently plan to exhibit, either immediately preceding or following the show. To accomplish this, we are in need of volunteers to act as the host for these training classes near where the shows are being held. Please take a look at the list of currently planned trips to see if you could serve as the host for these important classes. I would also like to point out that the new interactive GPO Access CD-ROM is out and we are soliciting comments on how future versions can be improved. One thing is already clear, the way in which the video clip demonstrations are accomplished has created a situation causing unreasonable load time. Newer, more efficient technologies are being explored for future versions. In addition, I would like to state that a new version of the printed training manual is nearing completion and should be available in the near future. The handout contains information on new items on GPO Access and things on the horizon. Thank you for your time and I look forward to talking with you during the conference.