ADMINISTRATIVE NOTES NEWSLETTER OF THE FEDERAL DEPOSITORY LIBRARY PROGRAM VOL. 19, NO. 08 GP 3.16/3-2:19/08 JUNE 15, 1998 GPO ACCESS CONTINUES TO GROW REMARKS BY T.C. EVANS ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF ELECTRONIC INFORMATION DISSEMINATION U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE Before the Depository Library Council and Federal Depository Conference Monday, April 20, 1998 Arlington, VA It is a pleasure to report on the continued growth of both content and usage for GPO Access. I would like to start by thanking the people in Production who work so hard to ensure that you are provided with the best possible services through GPO Access. There are now more than 700 official Government databases available on GPO Access. These databases contain approximately 80 gigabytes of data and the total is growing by about 100 megabytes per day. Thousands more Government information products are accessible through GPO Access. In fact, a recent count designed to equate titles available electronically to paper titles distributed through the Federal Depository Library Program revealed a very interesting number. More than 100,000 electronic titles are available through the FDLP Electronic Collection. These titles include all of the products and services available on and linked to from GPO Access. This total is dramatic evidence of the transition to a more electronic FDLP. The number of electronic titles has grown by more than 31,000 so far this year and will continue to expand as more content is added to our servers, additional partnerships are achieved, and more titles on other sites are bibliographically controlled and linked from our site. As a result of Production's diligent efforts to improve response time, increasing publicity, and continuing efforts to improve GPO Access utility, I can once again report a large jump in the number of documents downloaded from GPO Access. Over 34 million documents have been downloaded from GPO Access in the past three months, with 13.5 million in March alone. This means that almost 57 million documents have been downloaded in the first six months of fiscal '98, compared to about 46 million for all of fiscal '97. User support contacts are rising as well, approaching 8,000 telephone and e-mail inquiries per month. The GPO Access User Support Team is now fully staffed, with eight specialists ready to answer your questions and planning is underway to add more specialists as workload warrants. In mid-May our support hours will increase, running from 7:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. This increase results directly from an analysis of contact reports from our phone system and we will continue to monitor these reports to see if additional time is needed. Personnel from the Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information are training the GPO Access User Support Team this week, so that they will be ready to answer any questions you may have on Information Bridge. We appreciate their taking the time to perform this training as part of our partnership for public access to these important information products. The results are in from both the FDLP and public surveys on GPO Access. Over 500 depository librarians took the time to complete the survey, or more than twice the number of responses received from the public. We appreciate this important feedback that showed that, while we are a success, there is still much room for improvement in GPO Access. Several new services are available for your use on GPO Access. A new shopping cart feature has been added to the Sales Product Catalog application. With this feature you can order up to 20 products on a single order, selected from either the results of a single search or from multiple searches. There is also an opportunity for you to edit the order before submitting it to GPO. These are only the beginnings of the improvements that are planned to assist you in locating and purchasing sales products from GPO. Two new agencies have added their GILS records to the many other agency records on GPO Access. They are the National Archives and Records Administration and the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. The Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents now contains data going back to 1995 and more will be added. The first quarter updates to the CFR are now available and the capability to search and retrieve subparts has been upgraded. As always, I would like to close by thanking you for the feedback we need to give you the products and services you want. I look forward to discussing your ideas for improvement throughout the conference.