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, 2001 Vol. 22, no. 16 (Vol. 22, no. 16) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ GPO Access Improving and Growing Remarks by T.C. Evans Director, Office of Electronic Information Dissemination Services Depository Library Council Meeting Alexandria, VA October 15, 2001 Introduction I appreciate the opportunity to update the Depository Library Council and the library community on the current and future state of GPO Access. Hopefully, you have a copy of our printed GPO Access update. It contains a variety of statistical information on GPO Access, as well as what is new and on the horizon. GPO Access continues to grow in terms of both the quantity of information available and in the amount of usage it sees. This growth will continue, particularly in the area of usage, as we improve performance of the site. Efforts are underway to remove some recently discovered barriers to timely and efficient use of the applications on GPO Access, and this should pave the way towards a faster rise in the number of documents downloaded from GPO Access. These barriers have acted to slow, or prevent altogether, the downloading of key documents at prime times during the business day (downloads of documents that time out, particularly large files). If successful, the changes being made should provide better and faster access to documents in popular applications such as the Code of Federal Regulations and the Federal Register. The changes will be made in phases, beginning with the newly released new titles of the CFR, and they will be implemented elsewhere as time and workload allow. While we believe that this will greatly reduce the problems being experienced by users, we will continue to strive towards other improvements that will benefit our users. Plans are under development for a GPO Access mirror site, to be housed in a geographically removed location such as the Denver Regional Printing and Procurement facility. Initially, the site will consist only of servers configured to provide geographically separate backup storage. Once a replacement for the existing WAIS search engine has been identified, procured, and implemented, work will be undertaken to expand this facility into a complete mirror site for GPO Access. We are also actively engaged in expanding our ability to measure the performance of the GPO Access system from the user's perspective. Two tracks are being pursued concurrently. The first is a contract with the Keynote performance measurement service. This contract provides data on the performance of key elements of GPO Access as experienced by users who are both geographically and technologically diverse. The contract also measures performance of transactions such as searching for and retrieving a large file from Title 40 of the CFR. Data from the first three months of the contract has already proved beneficial in identifying areas needing work and we are looking at the possibility of expanding the contract to provide even more useful data. The second track focused on utilizing volunteers from our user communities to act as our eyes and ears to test system performance. The initial attempt proved unsuccessful, as only two volunteers returned test results. My staff is currently revaluating our approach to see if the concept could be redesigned to get a better response. User Survey On July 25, 2001, we posted our latest user survey on GPO Access. It was our fourth annual survey and was designed to learn about our users, their use of GPO Access, and their opinions as to how it could be improved. Almost 500 responses were received by the September 30, 2001 deadline. As always there were some interesting findings and the following are some I would like to share: * More than a third of our respondents indicated that they represented a Federal depository library. Thank you for your strong participation. * More than two thirds said that they use GPO Access more than twice a month and over a third use it 10 or more times a month. * The single most given response when asked how they learned about GPO Access was from a depository library. Considering the number of depository respondents, who did not all give that answer by the way, this means that quite a few of the non-depository respondents learned about us through your efforts. Thank you for helping to spread the word. In general we received information that will help as we work to improve our products and services. This is particularly true of the self-help tools on GPO Access. In part, the information gathered will be used to aid a new effort my staff is working on to develop a hyper-FAQ which will hopefully lead users to the appropriate GPO Access resources by clicking on answers to questions designed to learn what they are looking for. I would very much like the assistance of some of the depository community in finalizing this product. If you are willing to share your well-earned expertise in assisting patrons needing Government information resources to help with this effort, please see me at some point during the conference. Search Engine Results The seventh in a series of ongoing evaluations of the positioning of GPO Access pages in the search results of major Internet search engines and directories has just been completed and will be available on the Federal Bulletin Board. It has become clear that it is important to be among the top five results from a search if you want your site to get noticed and the results of this evaluation are encouraging. Top-5 returns improved significantly, with three engines: Searchgov, FirstGov, and GoogleUncleSam each doing so more than 40 percent of the time. Top-10 returns also increased, but at a much smaller rate. While top-30 returns showed marked increases, current industry thinking holds that these are becoming less important in reaching new users. Two sites, Excite and Webcrawler, achieved significant improvement in GPO Access returns, both increasing 122% in top-5 returns from the sixth evaluation to the seventh. Dramatic declines were discovered for About, NorthernLights, and AOL.com. The increasing importance of paid positioning and how it might relate to GPO Access is being tested through paying for positioning on five keywords related to the U.S. Government Online Bookstore in the widely used index created by GoTo. Since July 12, 2001, over 900 users have visited the Online Bookstore as a result of this positioning. Because GoTo supplies the paid portion of the indices for AOL Search, MSN, HotBot, Lycos, Netscape Search, and Alta Vista, paying for position in GoTo covers a lot of ground. The test's early success suggests that it might be worthwhile to buy positioning for other GPO Access applications in the future. As part of our effort to improve through this project, it would be helpful if you could assist us in reviewing the keyword search terms that we are using in the evaluation. Hopefully you picked up a copy of the Keyword Suggestions form that was next to our update handout in the back of the room. Please take a few moments to let us know what you think and return the forms to the registration desk before leaving the conference. If you can't find the time before leaving, please complete the form when you get home and mail it to the address provided on the form. What's new on GPO Access There are a number of recent changes to GPO Access that should be mentioned. The most notable are: * The redesigned GPO Access Training is now available online and an initial print copy will be delivered to each depository library in the near future. It is designed in a double-sided, three-hole, loose-leaf format so that future updates can easily be incorporated into the existing manual. Notifications of all updates will be posted to the listserves commonly followed by the depository library community and the updates will be available online through the GPO Access help page. * A new listserve service is now available. Anyone with e-mail service can subscribe to a growing number of lists to receive information as e-mail messages. Initially, the options include the daily table of contents from the Federal register and both decisions and studies from the Merit Systems Protection Board. In the near future lists will be added for a number of key subject areas to notify interested individuals of new publications available through the Sales Program. GPO is also working to satisfy requests for different listserves from several other agencies. * Some important changes have been made to the suite of finding aids available on GPO Access. The Pathway Indexer has been replaced with search across the Federal Government provided by FirstGov. FirstGov was also kind enough to supply an index of just GPO's web sites that can be searched from the same page. A new page was added to provide links to indexes that are put up by other agencies to identify their publications. This agency publications indexes page currently has links to indexes offered by the Agriculture, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, and Justice Departments, as well as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. What's on the Horizon for GPO Access As always, work is under way to add more content to GPO Access and to refine access to the materials already provided. Some key examples of current efforts are: * A search is underway for the appropriate software to facilitate the completion and official rollout of the eCFR application. In the meantime the beta version will continue to be available. * Work is progressing on the use of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to ensure the authenticity of documents downloaded from GPO Access. Initial efforts are focusing on notices submitted for publication in the Federal Register and Congressional Bills. Users will be able to use a free reader to verify that a document retrieved from GPO Access has not been altered since it was signed. This will remain true if the file is passed on to another user from the user who originally downloaded it. There will be a free version of the reader available for download on GPO Access that has been customized for use with our products, but the regular version will work with our files as well. * My staff is also hard at work on the Biennial Report to Congress on GPO Access, which is due in December. It will be available on GPO Access as soon as it has been officially transmitted to Congress. * A number of key enhancements are on the horizon for the U.S. Government Online Bookstore that will make it even easier to use. We are also looking at software packages being used by successful e-tailers that will form the platform for future development of this important site. As you can tell, there is a lot happening with GPO Access as it continues to grow and improve. I urge you to participate in this development process by continuing to provide us with your valuable feedback whenever possible. Participate in this afternoon's open forum, volunteer for usability studies and focus groups, or just give your comments to the GPO Access User Support Team. Thank you and I look forward to talking with you during the conference.