ADMINISTRATIVE NOTES Newsletter of the Federal Depository Library Program --------------------------------------------------------------------- May 1, 2000 GP 3.16/3-2:21/07 (Vol. 21, no. 07) --------------------------------------------------------------------- GPO ACCESS UPDATE Remarks by T.C. Evans Assistant Director, Office of Electronic Information Dissemination Services Before the Depository Library Council April 10, 2000 Newport, RI It is always nice to have the opportunity to update you on the ever-changing state of GPO Access. Those who know me would probably say that I am rarely at a loss for words anyway, but with GPO Access as a subject I am never short of material. 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. I also like to express our thanks to the users who participate in this development process by letting us know what works and what could use a little work. The value of their feedback cannot be overstated. In fact 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 success in getting the pages of GPO Access indexed properly by major search engines. In addition, please feel free to discuss your ideas for improving GPO Access with me at anytime during the conference. As part of our feedback process we conduct an online survey of GPO Access users on a regular basis. Our most recent survey concluded on January 3, 2000. Only 281 responses were received, 19% of which were from users who identified themselves as representing depositories. Some of the survey's key findings were: * When asked how they learned of GPO Access, 31% of the respondents indicated that they had found us through an Internet search, 25% by exploring links from other sites, 11% through a class, 9% through a Federal depository library, 7% through word of mouth, 6% through articles or notices, 4% through a GPO Access gateway library, 3% at a conference, and 4% gave other answers. The class answers were significant in that they were all write-in responses. * In terms of frequency of use, 44% of respondents indicated that they use GPO Access at least once per week, 24% use it a few times per year, 20% use it every few weeks, and 12% use it once a year or less. Responses from depositories showed higher use, with 39% using GPO Access daily, 38% at least once per week, and 17% every few weeks. * When asked what they use GPO Access for, 27% checked tracking legislation, 26% legal research, 26% patron assistance, 26% for academic research of various types, 21% business decisions, 21% homework, 19% checked public policy, and 11% teaching. There were also some interesting write-in responses, including 9% personal use (one indicating it was research for a science fiction novel), 2% library administration, 1% buying GPO stuff. * The use of finding aids results were interesting in that there was a great deal of differentiation between depository and non-depository respondents. For instance 74% of depository respondents indicated they use the online version of MOCAT, while 45% of non-depository respondents checked it. It was still the most used at 51% overall, with the LSU Agency Internet Sites coming in a close second at 49%. This order was reversed for non-depository users. Some complaints were included for the online catalog relating to dissatisfaction with how it works and how far back it goes. On the humorous side, one respondent took the time to complain about FedWorld. * High marks were received on users finding the information they need, the timeliness of the information, and user support. * Also of note was the shifting technology of respondents. More seem to have better systems with larger monitors and are using faster connections that in any of the previous surveys. Moving on to system performance, our efforts to provide the fastest possible response times continue. Data indicates that the BigIP server controller array has definitely provided a superior balancing of our user load and effectively distributed the workload throughout our resources. We have encountered some delays in upgrading our bandwidth and this continues to pose problems during the busiest hours of the day. A moratorium on projects that require work under the streets is causing the latest delay, but we continue to work closely with our ISP to maximize performance through the existing circuitry. We anticipate completion of the bandwidth upgrade in the next few weeks and will continue to monitor utilization and load distribution to ensure the best possible system response based on the factors we can control. Our efforts to better quantify GPO Access use has also proceeded. February was the busiest month ever on GPO Access, with almost 23.3 million downloads recorded. Usage of the recently added Ben's Guide to U.S. Government continues to grow quickly. In its first three months 750,000 retrievals have been recorded for Ben, with more than 340,000 in February alone. Based on our monitoring of the bandwidth utilization reports, it is reasonable to assume that GPO Access retrievals would have been even higher if more bandwidth had been available. It should also be noted that there is some unknown amount of additional usage that is unmeasurable. Aside from individuals sharing files they have downloaded from GPO Access, there is an increasing amount of institutional caching that cannot be measured. For example, America Online frequently caches popular items to speed access for their users. Even though we have discussed the possibility of gaining some usage numbers with them, it remains unlikely that any useful measurements will be gained in this area. GPO Access now contains more than 106,000 electronic titles and points to over 68,000 others. This represents a growth rate of almost 6% for the fiscal year-to-date. There are almost 1,500 databases available on GPO Access, which is also a significant increase over the same time last year. Little has changed in terms of the popularity of individual GPO Access pages. Many users appear to be bookmarking pages for specific applications and returning directly to those pages in the future. The Federal Register application is the most popular starting point, followed by the page that allows multiple databases to be searched at the same time. In third place we find the page that allows users to browse that day's table of contents for the Federal Register. For the month of February, the release of the Budget by OMB raised two of those pages into the top-ten, pushing traditional top-ten pages out. Since the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) is far and away the numerical leader in documents downloaded, it is somewhat surprising that none of the CFR pages show up in the top-ten entry pages. Further examination revealed some reasons why this is the case. Browsing appears to be much more popular than searching and many browsers are interested in only a specific area of the CFR. Each of these separate areas can be individually bookmarked so that the user can immediately go to the section that interests them most. This spreading of entries into the CFR application prevents it from showing up in the reports, but it is still clearly the most popular application on GPO Access. The GPO Access User Support Team handled almost 7,000 inquiries in February, the most since last April. Of these approximately 4,500 were telephone calls and over 2,400 were e-mails. I have already mentioned that our redesigned Online Bookstore was receiving more traffic. This rising traffic is translating into increasing electronic sales. New data indicates that more users are starting to submit their orders electronically, rather than printing them out and sending them in. We continue to learn as much from our users about creating the electronic ordering environment that is right for them and to translate what we have learned into improved customer service on our secure site. One part of the GPO Access mission is to improve access to official Federal government information. One important aspect of this is facilitating the ability of potential users to find our electronic information resources through major search engines. As a result, we have undertaken an ongoing project to evaluate how our resources are presented by these search engines and to work towards improving this performance. We recently completed the third evaluation and the results indicate that our efforts are bearing fruit. More detail will be provided in the Wednesday morning discussion and we hope you will help us in this effort by helping us refine the tags we imbed in our Web pages and improving the searches that we used to evaluate search engine performance. In this latest evaluation, the most effective search engines at returning GPO Access resources in their results were: 1. The Open Directory Project at 58% 2. Google-Uncle Sam at 54% 3. IWon at 51% 4. Snap at 51% 5. HotBot at 49% 6. Northern Lights (fee-based) USGovsearch at 43% 7. Google at 40% 8. Go.com at 37% 9. GoTo at 37% 10. Webcrawler at 33% The other engines evaluated, presented alphabetically were About, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, AOL.com, DirectHit, Excite, Governmentguide (AOL), LookSmart, Lycos, Magellan, MSN Search, Northern Light (free), Yahoo, and Yep. My organization recently took over responsibility for managing the operation of the U.S. Fax Watch system. The service is still available at (202) 512-1716. We recently sent out some updated instructions on using this system to the various listserves, including GOVDOC-L. We suggest that you obtain the latest copy of the Index of Available Shipping Lists prior to requesting any individual list. The index is updated every Friday. In the future, we also expect to add the capabilities for you to receive documents via e-mail and the Web, in addition to fax. If you have specific questions about your fax requests or are having trouble with your transmissions, please contact the Fax Watch Manager at , ATTN: Faxwatch Manager or by fax at (202) 312-0114. At this point I would like to spend a few moments describing some of the recent changes to GPO Access. Of special note are: * On April 3, 2000 - Conclusions of Law and Order: In State of New York, ex. rel. Eliot Spitzer, et al., v Microsoft Corporation became available. * The second volume of the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States for 1997, covering July-December was added this past Friday. Additional volumes will be included as they become available. * Supplement 3 to the U.S. Code is now complete (titles 1-50) for laws in effect as of January 28, 1998. Supplement 4 has been added and contains titles 1-41 for laws in effect as of January 5, 1999. * The Economic Report of the President, 2000 was made available in February. * The FY 2001 Federal Budget Documents are also available. * Deschler's Precedents of the Unites States House of Representatives was released in January and secure order links have since been added to the page for anyone wishing to purchase a paper copy. * The GPO Access Online Bookstore has a new and easier to remember URL. The address is now simply . In addition to the improvements already described, there are some upcoming changes to GPO Access that bear mention. They are: * New, easy to remember URLs are also being prepared for the main GPO Access page and for the library services page. * A Statutes at Large application is under development. * Development of a website for the U.S. Supreme Court is nearing completion. The final changes requested by the Court are being processed so that a release can be made in the near future. * Work on the daily updated electronic version of the Code of Federal Regulations, known as the e-CFR is progressing in conjunction with the quarterly update cycle. The current target for release is around the first of the year. * The Internet bandwidth available to service GPO Access customers will be increased by 150% in the near future. Part of the reason this effort has taken this long is that the project includes the installation of the infrastructure necessary to quickly provide additional bandwidth increases in the future. With this new circuitry, we will be able to incrementally add bandwidth as necessary when demand climbs beyond acceptable ranges on the currently used circuits. * A number of enhancements to the GPO Access Online Bookstore are underway. Each is designed to improve a potential customer's ability to locate and purchase the products they need from our Sales Program. As you can tell, GPO Access is continuing its rapid evolution. I remind you how important your feedback is to this process and I hope you will continue to take the time share your ideas for making GPO Access better.