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
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May 1, 2001
GP 3.16/3-2:22/07
(Vol. 22, no. 07)
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[Handout]
GPO Access Update
Office of Electronic Information Dissemination Services
Spring 2001 Depository Library Council Meeting
GPO Access Statistical Measures
* GPO Access achieved a record high of over 32 million document
retrievals for the month of January 2001.
* GPO Access contains almost 119,000 electronic titles and points to
more than 84,000 others, for a total of almost 203,000 titles.
* GPO Access provides use of almost 1,900 databases through more than 80
applications.
* GPO Access received over 500,000 referrals from other Web sites for
the month of January. Of these referrals 54% had an undetermined
source (the origin of the referral could not be detected by the log
program) and, over 30% came from the ".com", ".gov", and ".mil"
domains (13.6% ".com", 17.8% ".gov", and < 1% ".mil"). The domains for
".net", ".org", and ".edu" had a combined total of almost 7%, and 2.3%
were referred from Federal Depository Libraries. To date, for FY 2001,
Federal Depository Libraries have had a cumulative 56,678 referrals
with a high of 18,461 referrals in October 2000.
What's New on GPO Access
* The Davis-Bacon Wage Determinations application is available at
.
* A summary of the President's budget plan entitled A Blueprint for New
Beginnings - A Responsible Budget for America's Priorities is
available at .
* FY 2002 Economic Outlook, Highlights from 1994 to 2001, FY 2002
Baseline Projections is available at
.
* A Public Documents Distribution Centers Page has been added to GPO
Access with links to the centers in Laurel, Maryland and Pueblo,
Colorado at .
Usability Testing
We are constantly looking for valuable feedback to improve the usability of
GPO Access. A number of methods are used for this purpose, including focus
groups, online surveys, and of course, questions and comments received by
the GPO Access User Support Team on a daily basis. In addition to these
mechanisms, we have started doing usability testing at usability-testing
centers, in order to get immediate feedback on how users find government
information on GPO Access. This will provide us with another measure of the
effectiveness and efficiency of our site, as well as the satisfaction of
users. We recently conducted our first usability study at the Bureau of
Labor Statistics lab in Washington, DC. The results were most helpful and
will be used in the ongoing development of GPO Access. We are currently
trying to recruit hosts for usability testing. If you have a lab or know of
an available lab, or are interested in participating in or hosting future
usability studies for GPO Access, please contact Jason Humm, Office of
Electronic Information Dissemination Services, by phone at (202) 512-2122
or email .
Section 508
GPO staff are also undertaking an examination of Section 508 of the
Workforce Investment Act, which is meant to increase accessibility for the
disabled in the workplace, to determine how it might apply to GPO Access
Web pages. In particular, we are looking at how the sixteen Section 508
standards increase accessibility, and how each of these standards might
apply to the GPO Access Web site and its hosted sites.
Metadata Evaluation
Dublin Core Metadata Elements have been incorporated into the HTML source
code of our major Web pages as information resource descriptions. Our goal
is to use these elements to help facilitate indexing of GPO Access pages in
our site search and in Internet search engines to support consistent use of
metadata elements on Web pages. For more information on the Dublin Core
Metadata Initiative, please visit .
Search Engine Results
EIDS is continuing its ongoing process of attempting to achieve higher
positioning for GPO Access pages in the search results of major Internet
search engines. After conducting research on each search engine examined in
the study, it is apparent that paid positioning in search engines is
becoming more prevalent. In light of this, EIDS is currently examining
measures in regards to paid placement and positioning to improve the
ranking of certain pages in major Internet search engines.
News for Ben's Guide to U.S. Government for Kids
Ben's Guide was recently highlighted in the February, 2001 issue of Skewl
Sites newsletter as "a top notch resource to teach many topics related to
government." In addition to that honor, Lightspan's StudyWeb featured Ben's
Guide as one of the best educational resources on the Web. The U.S.
Government Printing Office is holding the first ever Ben's Guide focus
group on May 9, 2001 in Long Island, New York. The focus group will be held
with students from local schools in an attempt to gain feedback about Ben's
Guide from a student's perspective.
Conferences
We recently participated in the "Computers in Libraries" conference held
from March 14-16 in Washington, DC. We will also be participating in the
Medical Library Association 2001 Information Odyssey being held in Orlando,
FL from May 26-29, the Annual American Library Association Conference being
held in San Francisco, CA from June 14-20 and we will finish up FY 2001 at
the American Association of Law Libraries Conference in Minneapolis, MN
being held from July 14-19.
Coming Soon
* An eCFR application, which will be updated daily as opposed to the
current quarterly updated Code of Federal Regulations application,
will be available soon.
* As a result of the development of the free eCFR application, the Sales
program is developing a new e-mail subscription service and a
quarterly CD-ROM subscription service on a fully rendered CD-ROM with
a search engine installed program. Customers will be able to purchase
subscriptions that will allow them to be notified via e-mail of any
changes in one or more CFR titles and/or parts, as they are published
in the Federal Register.
* GPO Access is currently researching a subscription service that will
allow us to monitor the site's performance at various times from a
user's perspective. This will allow GPO to gain knowledge about what
enhancements should be made to increase the overall performance of GPO
Access.