Government Web pages: the lights are on but nobody is home
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045459 |
| Pages | 149-156 |
| Published date | 01 February 1996 |
| Date | 01 February 1996 |
| Author | Julie Johnson |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Article
Government
Web
pages:
the lights
are on but nobody is home
Julie Johnson
Department of Library
and Information
Science,
Edith Cowan
University,
2
Bradford
St,
Mt
Lawley,
6050
Western
Australia,
Australia
E-mail:
j-johnson@cowan.
edu. au
Abstract:
This
article sets out
the
writer's impressions gleaned from an
extensive examination of the homepages mounted on the World
Wide Web
by
governments and government
agencies.
The
writer
is
critical of the quality of the
information made available and identifies some possible explanations for the
perceived shortcomings of the homepages. A rush to establish a Net presence has
encouraged agencies to mount pages without having clearly defined their
intended audience. Much of the information is in the form of
'HTMLised'
documents originally created for other purposes. Frequently these are accessed
from pages structured from the point of view of the
agency,
without reference to
the perceptions and needs of the users of the
information.
In order to overcome
these
shortcomings,
the writer proposes a more rigorous evaluation of Web
publishing projects which are led by information professionals and others
involved in the direct delivery of information
services,
with a smaller role for IT
personnel than is currently the case.
1.
Introduction
This is a flame article. I expect it to
upset some of you. My aim is to get
people to think seriously about the po-
tential of the Internet as a medium for
the dissemination of public informa-
tion. There are many worthy people
working hard, often without adequate
resources and in their own
time,
to cre-
ate government home pages for the
Web.
Much of their work is innovative
and attractive. My intention is not to
denigrate the efforts of these sincere
and hard-working people, but rather to
raise some concerns about the nature
of the endeavour and to identify what
needs
to
happen
to
ensure that the elec-
tronic dissemination of government
information reaches its full potential.
2.
Government home pages
Governments are large and amorphous
bodies. They are made up of many
parts,
including elected repre-
sentatives and the bureaucracy which
is,
itself,
composed of a range of or-
ganisations. There are central agencies
or departments whose role is to de-
velop policy and oversee the opera-
tions of government as a
whole.
There
are line agencies whose role is to de-
liver some kind of service like educa-
tion, health or roads. There are also
semi-government agencies which pro-
vide a range of services to the govern-
ment and the public, but remain at
arm's length from the central bureauc-
racy: examples include scientific re-
search organisations or public
broadcasting bodies. This article .fo-
cuses on the use of Web pages by cen-
tral and line agencies of the core bu-
reaucracy.
There are all kinds of
pages
which
could be described as government
home pages. These include pages be-
longing to schools (Figure
1
overleaf),
libraries and tourism bodies (Figure 2
overleaf), as well
as
other line and cen-
tral agencies Many of these are in-
tended to serve a well-defined commu-
nity of users and are not
the
main focus
of my concern. There are other pages
that present very general and shallow
information to an unspecified popula-
tion and, in many instances, it is diffi-
cult to see what value is added by pre-
senting the information via the Net.
Other pages are
a
compilation of exist-
ing information resources, sometimes
created primarily for internal use, that
have been 'HTMLised' and dumped
on the
Net with little or no guidance for
potential users. For example, a user of
the award-winning British Govern-
ment home page (http://www.open
.gov.uk/) who searches for information
about child care benefits arrives at the
screen shown in Figure 3. The docu-
ments listed are essentially policy
documents created for internal use and
do not contain basic information about
what benefits are available or how to
apply for them.
A major area of government pub-
lishing on the Net is 'whole of govern-
ment' home pages. These are the
pages,
usually mounted by a central
agency, which seek to provide links to
all other pages produced by agencies
within that particular government (lo-
cal,
state or federal). They are intended
to form the 'ante-room' or 'veranda'
through which the public can access
the information resources of
the
vari-
ous agencies. This is a laudable goal.
Anything which helps to reduce the
barriers between the person with the
problem and the information needed to
solve it has to be a good idea. Govern-
ment Web pages concern me in two
ways.
I am not sure that the type of in-
The Electronic Library, Vol. 14, No. 2, April 1996 149
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