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) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Handout] [GPO Access logo]GPO Access Update Office of Electronic Information Dissemination Services Federal Depository Conference / Fall Council Meeting October 14-17, Alexandria, VA GPO Access Statistical Measures * Since January 2001, GPO Access has reached over 32 million document retrievals in both January and March, and is averaging almost 31 million document retrievals per month. * GPO Access contains 128,229 electronic titles and points to 87,668 others for a total of 215,897 titles. * GPO Access provides use of over 2,200 databases through more than 80 applications. What's New on GPO Access * The FY 2001/2002 United States Government Manual is now available at * GPO Access hosts the U.S.-China Security Review Commission Web site at . * The Budget of the United States Government for FY 2002 is now available at . * Hinds' Precedents of the House of Representatives database is available at . * The 2001 Unified Agenda (also known as the Semi-Annual Regulatory Agenda) is now available at . * The new finding aid, Agency Publications Indexes, is now available at . * A new regulatory catalog featuring sales products relating to U.S. laws, regulations, decisions, and guidelines is available at . * GPOLISTSERV is now available at . This service enables customers to subscribe to email listservs moderated by GPO or hosted on GPO Access for other Federal agencies. Current lists include the Federal Register Table of Contents and MSPB Decisions and Studies Lists. Several listservs are under development that will announce GPO sales products related to popular topics. New Training Manual A new GPO Access Training Manual has been completed and is now available at . The library community will be notified of updates to the manual through various available listservs. The new training manual includes search tips for recently added applications as well as a better user-friendly format. An initial print copy will be distributed in double-sided, three-hole, loose-leaf format to each Federal depository library. In order to provide the most current training manual possible, updates to the manual will be available from the GPO Access help page to print and add/replace pages in the booklet. Printed versions of the manual are currently in the print process and will be distributed in the near future. GPO Access now features FirstGov search interface A new GPO Access finding aid has been added to provide greater accessibility to Federal Government information. Designed to replace the page containing the Pathway Indexer, the agency search engine feature, and the discontinued GovBot, users may now search the Federal Government using the FirstGov search index. Users will have the choice to search the entire federal government or just GPO Access pages. Search Engine Results EIDS has completed the seventh in a series of ongoing evaluations in an attempt to achieve higher positioning for GPO Access pages in the search results of major Internet search engines and directories. The results of this report have been favorable. Top 5 returns have improved to 23%, a 10% increase. While top 10 returns only increased 4%, top 30 returns increased 14%. Two search engines that have shown a significant improvement in returns of GPO Access pages are Excite and Webcrawler, both increasing 122% in top 5 returns from the sixth evaluation to the seventh. Furthermore, paid positioning has been purchased for the Online Bookstore for five keywords in the popular search engine GoTo. Since July 12, 2001, over 900 users have clicked to the Online Bookstore from GoTo or one of its affiliates. Because GoTo supplies the paid portion of the indices for AOL Search, MSN, HotBot, Lycos, Netscape Search, and Alta Vista, paid positioning in GoTo will also achieve higher rankings in these engine. Copies of this report will soon be available at by clicking the link for GPO Access Search Engine Project Report. 2001 User Survey Results On July 25, 2001, we posted our User Survey on GPO Access. It was the fourth user survey designed to learn from our users their usage patterns, and their opinions of GPO Access. By our deadline of September 30, 2001, we received 478 responses. Below, we have summarized some of the survey's key findings. * Personal Affiliation: Federal depository library (35%); general public (20%); government (14%); other (13%); academic/education (12%); non-depository library (7%). * Time GPO Access used per month: 10+ (36%); 0-2 (27%); 3-5 (19%); 6-10 (18%) * Gained knowledge of GPO Access: Federal Depository Library (24%); Internet search (20%); link from another site (16%); training class (11%); conference/trade show (5%); other (26%) * The most frequently used Finding Aids were: Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (21%), Government Sites By Topic (16%), Federal Agency Internet Sites (16%), Government Information Products For Sale By Topic (11%), Sales Product Catalog (10%), Government Information on Selected Internet Sites (9%), New Electronic Titles (8%), Government Information Locator Service (8%), and other (1%). * Percentage of the time users find the information they needed: 75%-100% (46%), 50%-75% (32%); 0%-25% (10%); 25%-50% (8%); never (3%). * GPO Access Site Search page rating: Good (44%), Fair (28%), Excellent (15%), and Poor (14%). Upcoming Outreach EIDS personnel will be attending and displaying the GPO booth at the following shows: Nov. 4-8 ASIS (American Society for Information Washington, DC Science and Tech) Nov. 6-8 Internet Librarian 2001 Pasadena, CA Nov. 14-18 American Association of School Libraries Indianapolis, IN