Whole-of-Government Internet Information
a presentation by Kerry Webb for the ACS Canberra Branch Conference 13 May 1995
The National Library of Australia has an Information Server accessible from the Internet. This Server contains a great deal of information about the Library (its services, collections, publications) and also has pointers to many information sources which are relevant to the Library's mission. In this latter context the Library has stated that it intends to be a focal point on the Internet for information about Australia, and it follows that a key component of this information will be a planned and logical structure for links to Government information.
This structure was being developed late in 1994 when the Commonwealth Internet Reference Group (CIRG) proposed that a 'Whole of Government' page be set up, with links to the various Internet servers being established by Commonwealth, State and Local government bodies. The Library was pleased to give a commitment to do this, mostly because it was already in train. It's important to note the word 'commitment' because there have been many examples on the Internet of good ideas that have been established, but because the initiator's enthusiasm wanes, or the person leaves that organisation, or the organisation's priorities change, the idea is not followed up or developed. For a project such as the Government pages, there had to be an understanding they would be maintained for a very long time. The Library was prepared to give this.
A series of draft pages, setting out the general structure was presented to CIRG in December 1994, and was generally accepted. There was some discussion about which classification of Commonwealth departments and agencies would be used, and it was decided that the layout should consist of Parliamentary Departments at the beginning, to be followed by Ministerial Departments, and then Statutory Authorities and other agencies. Other information about the Commonwealth Government would appear at the end of the page. This is basically the layout used by the Canadian Open Government server.
There had been some argument that agencies should be listed under their portfolio departments, but we believed that in many cases the users would not know which portfolio an agency belonged in, and would be better served by an alphabetic listing of agencies in a separate section. As an example, if you were looking for ASTEC would you automatically think of Prime Minister and Cabinet, or the Australian Surveying and Land Information Group in Administrative Services. We would however recommend that when a department creates its own Home Page, that page should contain links to the servers of all the agencies in that portfolio.
The pages at present operate at three levels. The 'Whole of Government' page has pointers to pages for Federal, State and Local government information, as well as to a subject index to all government information, to policy documents from Australia and other countries on information infrastructure matters, and to information about major conferences on infrastructure topics.
The layout of the Federal page has been described already. There is one State page with links to each State and Territory. At this point it starts to get complicated. The preferred position would be that one organisation in each State and Territory would maintain a single page for all of that government's servers, in the same way as has been done with the Commonwealth Government. At present, only Tasmania and Victoria have done this, with the Department of Premier and Cabinet and Vicnet respectively taking on this role. Others should follow, but it may take some time, especially as some State governments show little enthusiasm for the Internet as an information delivery mechanism.
For most states then, the next level of the Library's pages contains lists (in alphabetical order) of pointers to the servers of departments and agencies in each jurisdiction.
The Local Government pages are still quite basic. We have given some thought to their eventual structure, and services will probably be arranged alphabetically within each state, but as there are only a handful of entries so far it's not necessary to go further at present.
It's also been suggested that we should include New Zealand servers in this structure, but the title of the Home Page would need to be unambiguous, and we propose to include a link to New Zealand at a higher level in the National Library's server rather than one the Australian Government pages.
So much for the structure, how is it maintained? Most of the entries have been supplied by people setting up their servers, which means that it is necessary to publicise that the pages exist and how information on new servers should be notified. This was initially done through CIRG and the knowledge is spreading among the community as CIRG and the pages become better known. It's also useful to have a pointer on the pages for comments and updates - we use the MAILTO Anchor HTML tag which all browsers (Lynx, Mosaic, Netscape) recognise and which permits e-mail from within the browser session.
It's also necessary to check the major Australian Web indexes regularly to see if new Government servers have been notified to them. Currently, the best of these is the Annotated Australian Address Book maintained by ozInternet. It features a section for new servers, and appears to rely on server managers to notify ozInternet about new servers. The other major index is David Green's Australian WWW Servers Page which also has a 'new servers' section. I've found the Address Book to be a better site for my purposes because the new servers are listed under categories such as 'Government'.
Actually, the existence of two indexes brings me to the question of 'official' Government Pages. If there is only one set of pages for Australian Government, it's easier to keep them up to date and correct, as a new server need only be reported to one site. And it's easier for users to go to one page to get all the information. But the Internet doesn't work like this. If the people in some organisation think they can do it better, they'll go ahead and do it. So if another Government agency wants to set up the 'official' Government Pages, the Library can't and wouldn't try to stop them. If in the opinion of the Library that agency is doing a better job and we're confident that they will continue to offer the service, then we'll possibly stop maintaining our pages and just point to theirs.
At present, the Office of Government Information and Advertising (OGIA) is doing something similar to the Library, but their charter is to distribute Commonwealth Government information, and they are using the Internet to do this. Their pages have more information than the Library's because all that we are trying to do is to point at agencies' servers, expecting that the agencies will include on their own pages the necessary information to explain what their roles and services are. OGIA is doing more than this because they choose to do so.
Other governments around the world are providing servers with government information, although there is a range of variations between the servers. The US is the most advanced, with two main services - Fedworld is based on a subject index and Fedix is a list of servers. Canada, the UK and New Zealand have all developed services comparable to the Australian model. Other governments such as Poland and Belgium are doing similar things. A good list of government servers can be found in the Yahoo Government index.
As for the future, we have no specific plans for the Government Pages, apart from incorporating any new servers that we find. We'll also take comments on the form and contents of the pages and improve them when we can. We've put more sophisticated mail functions into the pages since we started, to make feedback easier. We're working on the Subject Index which will for example, have entries for Health agencies or libraries or departments of Business and Commerce listed together.
Kerry Webb is the Director, Systems at the National Library of Australia, a position which he has held for 10 years. He first started using the Internet early in 1992 and writes a monthly column on the Net in the magazine of the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA). He has set up Web pages for ALIA and the Australian Electoral Commission, and is responsible for the Government pages on the National Library's server.