ADMINISTRATIVE NOTES Newsletter of the Federal Depository Library Program Vol. 18, no. 08 GP 3.16/3-2:18/08 May 15, 1997 Office of Electronic Information Dissemination Services Update Remarks by T.C. Evans Assistant Director, Office of Electronic Information Dissemination Services (EIDS) U.S. Government Printing Office Depository Library Council Federal Depository Conference Monday, April 14, 1997 Arlington, VA Introduction Good morning! It is my pleasure to provide you with an update on the many efforts currently underway at GPO to improve the products and services of GPO Access. While these efforts are numerous, in the interest of time, I will describe only those of major import. The others will come out as a part of the sessions being given by Terri Barnes and Vicki Ries the next three afternoons, which I hope many of you plan to attend. These sessions will contain a brief overview of GPO Access in general and detailed exposure to newer applications. GPO Access Response Time One of the most frequently mentioned issues with GPO Access over the last several months has been response time. As use and the amount of information available grew, response time suffered. Through a reconfiguration process and an upgrade of some equipment and software, dramatic improvements in navigating the Web site have already been realized. Additional improvements in the search and retrieval process are in mid- stream, with benefits beginning to show. As the equipment upgrades are completed, search and retrieval speed will be further enhanced. Evidence of this improvement is already apparent in the use statistics for March. GPO Access had been going along for some months stuck in the range of 2.5 to 3 million documents downloaded per month, and it was believed that, due to the identified trend pattern, this sudden plateau must be attributable to the response time problem. After the first round of changes had been made, downloads for March jumped to over 4 million, showing that the system is now able to handle more traffic. The commitment to improving response time will not stop with this success. A consultant contract is being prepared by our procurement area that will bring in outside expertise to help us to not only continue improving response time immediately, but will help us plan for the traffic that we anticipate in the future. OpenText for GPO Access The work on utilizing OpenText for GPO Access is proceeding. Even though GPO production personnel are vigorously working on this effort, there is a huge amount of work to be done and there are a number of other important efforts underway at the same time. So far this effort has succeeded in producing some of the needed SGML data for the Congressional Record, the Code of Federal Regulations, and the Commerce Business Daily. Quite a bit of testing is still required before any of this data can be used for GPO Access applications and I cannot at this time give you an authoritative date for the release of any of these applications. It is my hope that we will be able to show you some of the enhanced capabilities that will result from OpenText at the next meeting in Florida. While I am unable to demonstrate concrete evidence to you today, I feel secure that the use of OpenText will provide a number of benefits to users that will significantly enhance the search and retrieval process. You will be able to conduct more targeted searches using the capabilities of OpenText and the fully fielded SGML databases. These searches will return a list of results better tailored to your needs. As an example, a current search to find places in the Congressional Record where Senator Mikulski is speaking about nuclear energy is performed looking for her name and that topic in a fairly limited way. This results in a wide variety of results that may or may not have relevance to your needs. Through OpenText and SGML, you can pinpoint the locations in the database where Senator Mikulski is speaking and examine only those instances where she spoke about nuclear energy. It will also be easier for you to make use of the results that are returned from a search. Individual results that are important to you can be marked in advance and you can jump from one result to another without returning to the results list. The results will be available to you in both the formats familiar to you (ASCII and PDF) and in HTML and SGML as well. All of this can be accomplished in familiar ways using your Web browser or in more sophisticated ways using the OpenText SGML viewer or full client software. Since both will soon be incorporated into some of the CD- ROM products that will be distributed through the Federal Depository Library Program, you will probably be familiar with these packages before the databases are released. The SGML viewer can even be configured as a helper application to work automatically when called for by your Web browser. Any necessary information required for the more sophisticated possibilities will be downloadable along with the results. This would include the necessary style sheets and DTD's necessary to work with the SGML formatted data. GPO Access Training Through a joint effort between GPO/OCLC/RONDAC, substantially more opportunities for training on the products and services of GPO Access should soon be available. A number of the RONDAC networks have already indicated a desire to include GPO Access in their network's training offerings and others are considering it. My staff is working with the Chair of RONDAC, Dave Brunell, and contacts from several of the networks to set up train-the- trainer sessions. EIDS Products and Services * We are preparing to release the newest edition of the GPO Access home page. The final part of this effort will come from feedback received during a focus group held during this conference, which a number of you have graciously agreed to participate in. Our goal, as always, is to offer a page that gets you to the information you need as quickly and efficiently as possible. * Changes to CBDNet continue in response to user feedback. One such recent improvement is adding posting dates to the results from both the search and browse options. More changes, such as associating notices with the appropriate issue date and PDF files, are forthcoming. * After a lot of hard work, Terri and Vicki have completed their latest revision of the GPO Access User Guide. It should be available electronically by the end of this week, and work will begin on the printed version soon after that. * The GILS application on GPO Access now searches all WAIS- based U.S. Federal GILS sites as the default. This includes all GILS records maintained by GPO and those on other government GILS sites. A search using the default will return a results list of relevant records on any of these sites and those records can be retrieved. * New specialized search pages have just been released for the Congressional Record Index and the History of Bills. It is quick and easy to search across all available years, or to limit the search to a specific year. You will hear more about these and other developments from Terri and Vicki, but let me close by pointing out the importance of feedback from you, the users, in the ongoing growth of GPO Access. Many of the developments that you have enjoyed in the past and that you will hear about this week result from user suggestions. Keep up the good work.