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Access To and Services for Federal Information in the Networked Environment

Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval

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Issues:

• Mechanisms for locating information are rudimentary and less adequate than systems for other media

• Organization and indexing is chaotic, making access haphazard at this time. We will need to develop different strategies to identify, locate, and deliver federal information

• The necessity of paying for access (which had otherwise been free) and the limiting of passwords, in some access mechanisms, has the potential of hindering access

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Current situation:

• What's out there now?
  • multiformat

  • multiprovider - both government and commercial

• How is the user getting access now?
  • direct access through the Net, through direct agency contact, through clearinghouses

  • intermediary through libraries and depositories, relying on the expertise/knowledge of the librarian or through an index like MoCat, GRA&I, commercial counterparts

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Problems:

• NIDR issues:
  • finding what you want can be difficult because:
    there is no organized index or catalog;

    there is a proliferation of Web sites as pointers only resulting in a duplication of efforts;

    there is a lack of standard interfaces;

    the search and retrieval aspect is hit and miss, i.e. there is a lowering of functionality making access to print, etc. better;

    searching versus browsing - e.g. Economic Report of President is searchable but not browsable via GPO Access;

    potential diminished access due to cost and password restrictions;

    representation and rendering of complex text such as tables is uneven;

    Web as a stateless protocol and the problem of session-based interaction ... in near future sophisticated network-wide searching by topic will not occur; within particular servers &/or subject oriented servers there will be powerful search engines ... how do we get user to understand that there are grave limitations to Yahoo, etc.? Institutions need to develop strategies at the top level to deal with this ... home pages, etc.

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Solutions:

• Structured document searching capabilities ... sophisticated, well-developed search mechanisms to both find and use federal information

• NIDR - how is metadata represented in the networked environment?; how to manage machine to machine communication?

• GILS will be the underpinnings - the street names and addresses; it will be the standard syntax for describing government information; it will create corresponding subject locator based on controlling indexing vocabulary; it will locate public sites that will provide access to government information resources; it should make things coherent so others can come along and add to it; needs to operate at the top level

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Models:

• DLP - what are the overarching principles that should be retained?

• GPO Access provides indexing and full text; documentation online, list of databases and agency contributions is growing; took over OTA's server

• Subject oriented servers from a variety of sources - AOL, state, local, and institutional servers with links out to federal information

• Pathway Project - being done by GPO

• FedWorld - where does it fit in?

• What about Thomas, FinanceNet, etc.?

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	Developed & Maintained by: webmgr@cni.org	© 2008 Coalition for Networked Information ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Any comments, or feedback?		Last Update:   Wednesday, 03 July, 2002 - 04:22 PM - EDT