August/September, 1998 — Volume 16 Number 8/9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FEDLINK Kicks Off FY99 Registration Season

TECH NEWS: Measuring Web Site Traffic

OCLC News

ALA Comes to the Nation's Capital

The Latest FLICC/FEDLINK Educational Programs on Video

Editorial Staff

FEDLINK Kicks Off FY99 Registration Season

As the summer comes to a close and many members are reviewing their end-of-year options, FEDLINK staff began looking forward to 1999 and held its annual How to Use FEDLINK briefing on August 6, 1998. The Briefing is an opportunity for federal librarians, contractors, and procurement and contracting professionals to learn more about using FEDLINK as their source for acquiring publications, serials, online and CD-ROM databases, and library support services. Each year, FEDLINK holds the briefing as an update for current and potential FEDLINK members on key areas of FEDLINK operations, the costs and benefits of using FEDLINK, and a preview of the program for the next fiscal year.

All-Day Program Reviews the Basics

The morning began with a welcome from Susan M. Tarr, Executive Director of FLICC, immediately followed by an overview from Meg Williams, a FEDLINK Network Program Specialist. Williams spoke on the scope of FLICC and its membership and working groups, the FEDLINK program, and the federal regulations and principles that guide these programs. Calling procurement and finance issues a shared responsibility, Williams also elaborated on how contracting and budget officers, legal staff, agency managers, and users' duties overlap with FEDLINK's procurement services.

Williams then outlined the benefits of FEDLINK membership, including its centralized contracting and accounting services, shared resources to eliminate redundancy, and increased savings through consortial purchasing. She showed how FEDLINK saved federal agencies more than $9 million last year through cost avoidance and member discounts. Moving into the specifics of FEDLINK membership, Williams explained how FEDLINK and the member agency establish interagency agreements (IAGs) and how FEDLINK handles disbursements for both transfer and direct pay members.

The News for FY99Lower Transfer Pay Account Fees

All of FEDLINK's Fiscal and Network staffs were delighted to announce that transfer pay account fees for Fiscal Year 1999 (FY99) are lower. Williams announced the new transfer pay fees are

• 7.75% on the first $300,000 in each account, and
• 7.00% on amounts over $300,000 in each account.

Direct pay account fees in FY99 remain at 1998 prices—FEDLINK will charge a $1,200 flat fee for the first $100,000 in each account and then 0.6 percent on amounts over $100,000 in each account. Streamlining efforts also affect direct pay customers with purchase orders or purchase modifications less than $100,000. These orders no longer need Library of Congress authorization for service and can go directly to the vendor.

FEDLINK Gears Up for the Millennium

With all the news about computer issues and the Year 2000, often called Y2K, FEDLINK staff has already taken the steps necessary to be "Y2K compliant," ensuring that systems and accounts make a smooth transition when the calendar turns over both at the Fiscal New Year of October 1, 1999 and when the calendar changes to double zeros.

Vendors who are competing contracts for next year (and for the next round of serials competitions that will get underway next spring) must also assure FEDLINK in writing that they are Y2K-ready.

Fiscal Focuses on the FEDLINK Framework

The final segment of the morning program discussed the management of transfer pay accounts, including electronic funds transfer, member/vendor relations, and pro-active accounts management. Mary Wilson, Fiscal Manager and Head of Accounts Payable, explained invoice processing. She reported that although her staff handles more than 2,530 subscribers, "it is our hope to provide total electronic statement data in the near future." Mary Wilson also answered questions related to interagency funds transfer and invoice payments processing.

Audience Gains Insight into FEDLINK Services, Competition, and Vendor Selection

Williams introduced the full afternoon session's focus on the variety of services available through the FEDLINK program and how members can make the best vendor selections. She highlighted subscription and book pricing issues, serial agents, and consortial purchasing, technical processing, OCLC, electronic publications, and document delivery services. She targeted her briefing to the needs of librarians and contracting officials who wanted detailed information about specific procurement procedures. She also briefly addressed the question of licensing and its legal implications and the benefits of joining OCLC.

Training and Education Complete the Picture

By the end of the day, the audience was asking a variety of questions and asking for more sources of information. Williams mentioned the FEDLINK Technical Notes newsletter, a monthly publication that stays on top of member issues and offers OCLC News and a calendar of events. Williams also outlined the variety of professional development and training opportunities offered through FEDLINK including hands-on workshops; other institutes on acquisitions, metadata, cataloging; information professional symposia; and the annual FLICC Forum on Information Policy, held each March.

FEDLINK Is a Point, Click, and Call Away

At the conclusion of the day, Williams encouraged all current and future members to visit the FLICC/FEDLINK Web page (http://lcweb.loc.gov/flicc) for the latest program developments, member and vendor services, education and training opportunities, and electronic versions of newsletters, meeting announcements, information alerts, and other resource materials from a variety of events and federal library fora. Beyond the Web page, FEDLINK also offers the FEDLINK Hotline (202-707-4900) which members can use for answers to registration, billing, or other account questions.

How to Use FEDLINK Goes on the Road

The next stop for the program is San Antonio, Texas. Staff is heading west to repeat the program and assist members who could not attend the briefing in Washington, D.C. For a briefing or other onsite training in your area, please call the FLICC/FEDLINK Offices at (202) 707-4800 for details.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Tech News

Measuring Web Site Traffic

By Jessica Clark

Your library's Web site is up, filled with catalogs, links, and documents. You have mastered the differences between GIFs and JPEGs, and your daily interactions with virtual customers rival your face-to-face encounters. You have done it—you have gone digital.

Now how can you prove that it has all been worthwhile?

From Counters to Cookies and Beyond

A few years ago, Webmasters had it easy. There were relatively few HTML tags to remember, sites were not yet expected to jump and pulse, and Web traffic measurement merely involved slapping a freeware "hit counter" at the bottom of a home page. Quickly piling number upon number, the counters inspired both site creators and site sponsors to increase investments in Web-based projects.

Unfortunately it quickly became clear that the numbers were misleading. The "hits" the counters record do not translate into the number of site visitors. Instead, they represent the number of server requestsa much larger figure. When a user enters a URL into his/her browser, the browser requests the page and all of the images, sounds, or other objects that appear within it from the host server. Each of these requests is counted as a hiteven requests that fail.

Details about hits are recorded in the Web site server's transaction log. Webmasters soon found that these logs offer an awkward but useful starting point for measuring site traffic and usage. Each hit is recorded as one line in a long list and each record provides standard metrics, including:

• name and size of the page or object requested,
• a date and time for the request,
• the visitor's IP address (also known as their domain name),
• the URL for the page which linked the visitor to the site (also known as the referral link), and
• the type of browser and platform the visitor used.

Many vendors now offer products to parse and present these Web site statistics in glorious four-color charts. Shareware programs and online manuals also allow Webmasters to analyze log data and import it into existing database programs to develop complex usage reports. By combining the different metrics, developing estimates of the number of page views is possible, as is calculating the number of unique visitors, the number of visits, and the average duration of visits within a specified time.

Analyzing Web site traffic, however, remains a very inexact science. Measurements must be adjusted to count users who access previously cached versions of a page. Different users can still skew reporting by accessing a site from the same machineor the same user accessing the site from different machines. Because automated "bots" may visit a site to catalog its pages for search engines, you may need to eliminate them from your measurements, as well. Determining the length of a user's visit is problematic, as he or she may have several programs or browser windows open at once. Pages containing frames present yet another dimension of complications as the results count the different frames separately.

While commercial Web sites may set up user registration and cookies to improve their identification of unique visitors and track their movement through the site, federal Webmasters have to consider user privacy issues and appropriate information collection procedures before setting up such methods. (See the July FEDLINK Technical Notes online at http://lcweb.loc.gov/flicc/tn/98/07/tn9807.html for a column covering the debates surrounding online privacy in the federal context.)

For accurate reporting of Web site traffic, you must be familiar with the various methods and pitfalls of site traffic measurement and devise a solution for your site. Both commercial products and home-grown site measurement systems need to be tweaked to screen out invalid, internal, and duplicate page requests and to deliver reports customized to help you in future site development.

Standardizing Measurement Methods

In 1997, several companies concerned with online advertising models joined to spearhead the standardization of Web traffic measurement methods and terminology. They formed the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), and in September, the organization's Media Measurement Task Force issued "Metrics and Methodology," a report proposing voluntary guidelines for use in analyzing Web server logs. Although not every element in the IAB report applies in the federal context, it provides a few useful definitions.

Page request

The IAB report defines a "page request" as "an opportunity for a HTML document to be displayed within a browser window, which may contain text, images, media objects, or other online elements." Page requests are distinct from "page impressions" or "page views"—these terms suggest that the user has definitively downloaded and seen a page. This is currently unmeasurable. Methods for recording page requests on framed pages are less clear; the report suggests that the first framed page the user sees be recorded as one page request, and that additional pages that appear inside the frame window and significantly change the content of the page be recorded as additional page requests.

Visitor

The IAB report provides several methods for identifying visitors, including unique registration, unique cookies, and unique IP addresses. As noted above, the first two methods may be problematic for federal Webmasters to implement because of privacy concerns. The remaining method, identifying visitors through unique IP addresses, is not particularly accurate. IP addresses for servers owned by Internet service providers such as AOL may be used by many different visitors over the course of a day. However, you can roughly estimate the number of visitors by combining the IP address with a particular series of page requests determined to be a "visit," which the IAP report has defined as "a series of page requests by a visitor without 30 consecutive minutes of inactivity."

Audience

The IAB report suggests that one or all of the following measures can define a site's audience:

browser type,

platform,

first and second level domain names (such as loc.gov or army.mil),

referral link,

national vs. international,

regionality, and

unresolved IP addresses.

You can obtain some of these measurements, such as browser type and referral link, directly from the site's logs. Others may be inferred, although not with great accuracy. You can categorize national and international visitors by sorting their first level domain names into the designations typically used by sites in the US (.com, .gov, .mil, etc.) and the designations assigned to specific countries. However, these designations do not guarantee that the user is in the country associated with their server's domain name. Similarly, looking at second-level domain names can imply regionality (.loc, .army) and looking up the physical location of the institution associated with that name. Again, however, there is no way to tell if the visitor is using a server from a remote location. Finally, the report encourages Webmasters to report unresolved IP addresses as such, rather than lumping them into another category.

Clearly, these units of measurement do not provide entirely precise results. By using them to structure your site traffic analysis, however, you can make sure that you can consistently compare your results over time.

Planning for Traffic Measurement

Well-planned file naming schemes can greatly improve the efficiency with which you can find page requests in a site's logs and use a database or traffic analysis program to sort them. Imagine, for example, a library Web site with a book catalog organized by subject and that provides both descriptions and book jacket images. The path name for a single HTML file in this catalog might be:

http://www.libraryname.gov/catalog/topicname/bookname.html.

Cover images which accompany the book descriptions could be stored in a different directory. The path name for a single image might be:

http://www.libraryname.gov/catalog/images/imagename.html.

Such a naming scheme would allow you to separate page requests from image requests easily and to sort page requests by topic. Determining which topics are popular could then suggest trends for future book acquisition.

Structured naming schemes can also help in defining "page requests" for framed pages. HTML files which change the content of a page significantly when displayed inside the frame window could be stored in a particular directory. Hits for these pages could then be tabulated as single page requests.

If a site is located on an Intranet or only agency staff uses the site, you could compile more accurate visitor information by requiring users to register and log on to the system. Weigh the benefits of obtaining this information against the inconvenience to users and the administrative burdens of maintaining user names and passwords.

Web Traffic Measurement in "Reinvented" Government

Many federal Web sites initially evolved through the individual efforts of agency staff members. They have come to serve an ever-increasing range of functions, however, from providing a public "face" for agencies to delivering tailored, secured information to private citizens and businesses. As a result, sites have gained official recognition and been incorporated into agency performance plans. Libraries and information centers will be expected to justify the time, equipment, and money spent on developing and maintaining sites. Accurate Web site traffic analysis is the most valuable tool you have for demonstrating returns on the investments made in Web-based projects, and for planning the future growth of your site.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

OCLC News

FirstSearch Now Accesses Electronic Collections Online

FirstSearch users can access journals that they subscribe to through Electronic Collections Online through the FirstSearch Web interface. They can search the Electronic Collections Online bibliographic database like any other FirstSearch database and retrieve a list of article citations from journals the library subscribes to with links to their abstracts and complete articles.

On August 16, FirstSearch expanded its list of available titles, adding 22 new journals to bring its total of journals to 961. Three new publishers have also agreed to distribute journals through Electronic Collections Online (ECO): The British Medical Association, The Royal Society of Medicine, and Marcel Dekker, Inc.

FirstSearch features work well with ECO enhancing its services to include links to holdings in WorldCat (the OCLC Online Union Catalog) and document ordering from FirstSearch document suppliers. OCLC will also begin linking ECO content to other FirstSearch databases in the next few months.

Through FirstSearch, ECO continues to offer:

• A growing collection of journals (To date, OCLC has signed agreements for more than 1,200 journals with 28 publishers, including Academic Press, Kluwer Academic Publishers, and Johns Hopkins University Press.);
• electronic archiving for the volumes subscribed to, even for discontinued subscriptions; and
• collection management tools that include title-level subscriptions and usage statistics.

OCLC's charges for an ECO Access Account include a database fee of $300 per simultaneous user, plus $35 per journal title annually. OCLC does offer volume discounts on the database fee for multiple simultaneous users. Users also need an access account, starting at $3000/per simultaneous user. Libraries subscribing to FirstSearch files (i.e., the Base Package) would not be charged the $300 database fee.

FirstSearch continues to be on sale through September 30, 1998: one or more blocks of searches are available at the lowest price of $310/block of 500 searches. Request the order form from FEDLINK and fax your request to us at (202) 707-4873. (No snail mail orders, please!) Fax your orders in by September 18; after that date, contact FEDLINK immediately if you do not receive order confirmation from us.

ECO Print Program Extended into 1999

OCLC has extended the ECO Print Subscriber Program into 1999. Ten publishers have joined the growing list of those who are making the electronic versions of more than 450 of their ECO journals available (at no additional cost!) to institutions that subscribed to these titles in print for 1998. The group of publishers represents more than 300 journals already available through this program in 1999.

The following publishers have agreed to participate in the print subscribers program for the year(s) indicated:

• Blackwell Publishers (1998-99)
• Carfax Publishing (1998-99)
• The Institution of Chemical Engineers (1998-99)
• Institution of Mechanical Engineers (1998-99)
• Jossey-Bass, Inc. Publishers (1998)
• Kluwer Academic Publishers (1998)
• Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (1998)
• MIT Press (1998-99)
• Sage Publications (1999)
• The Ohio State University Press (1998)
• The Royal Society (1999)
• Routledge Journals (1999)
• Royal Society of Chemistry (1998-99)
• Scandinavian University Press (1998-99)

For a complete list of participating journals, see OCLC's home page at http://www.oclc.org/oclc/eco/printsubs.htm.

1999 Registration Reminders

Members must register and return signed IAGs in a timely fashion to begin FY99 services. Registration forms will be available in August. FEDLINK will block access to OCLC services for those who do not have signed IAGs returned to us by November 30, 1998.

Those who have not registered by the end of October will receive reminders from FEDLINK Network Operations in early November, and we will block OCLC access if members do not return their registrations by that time. Assuming Congress authorizes funds in a timely manner, signed IAGs will need to be returned by the end of November 1998.

Members can register for and/or establish IAGs for some services and amend their IAGs for other services later in the fiscal year if funds are not available for all services initially. Call the FEDLINK Fiscal Hotline at (202) 707-4900 if you have questions about these deadlines, the IAG process, or your account. The email address for fiscal questions is fliccffo@loc.gov.

Busy Users Save With an Internet Flat Fee

If your library is connected to OCLC more than 36 hours per month, Internet Flat Fee may be your least expensive alternative. OCLC Internet Flat Fee costs $134/simultaneous user/month. If you opt for overflow ability, they will charge the extra logons the regular per minute fee for Internet connection, $3.72/hour ($0.062/minute). The form to request Internet Flat Fee access is on OCLC's home page at http://www.oclc.org/oclc/menu/docforms.htm or call FEDLINK and we will fax you a copy.

Remember to notify FEDLINK if you switch to the Internet flat fee and (1) need to have asynchronous dial access authorization canceled to save the $225 annual fee or (2) need to request OCLC to remove the dedicated line for multidrop access.

Subscribers Wanted!

Do not forget to subscribe to FEDLINK's new OCLC listserv. Each FEDLINK OCLC library must designate at least one subscriber to the list by the end of September. Send your requests to listserv@loc.gov. In the body of your email, type the following subscribe command:

subscribe oclcfed yourfirstname yourlastname

The listserv will respond with a request for confirmation. You must confirm your request by typing OK within the body of a response email and sending it back. You have 48 hours to respond to the confirmation request from the listserv, or you will need to subscribe again. After the listserv has your confirmation, it will send you instructions on how to participate and/or unsubscribe, etc., just like other FEDLINK listservs. (See the July 1998 OCLC News in FEDLINK Technical Notes for more details.)

To see all of the available FEDLINK listservs, visit the Publications Page of the FLICC/FEDLINK Web site at http://lcweb.loc.gov/flicc/mmpubs.html. The complete list is at the bottom of the page.

Have a Question? Ask OCFNO!

FEDLINK has created an email address specifically for OCLC questions: askocfno@loc.gov. We created the new address as part of FEDLINK's ongoing customer service initiatives, to ensure that we answer your questions swiftly. We urge you to begin using the new email address rather than individual email accounts because staff who are traveling or attending programs and conferences may be unable to retrieve their individual email accounts. Please also use the new generic FEDLINK email address for simple or standard requests and inquiries: askocfno@loc.gov.

Return Multidrop Surveys to OCLC

Be sure to return to OCLC your "OCLC Multidrop Survey Form," faxing it to the number listed on the OCLC form. OCLC distributed the survey with the telecommunications usage analysis earlier this summer to update its databases about what OCLC equipment its member libraries use. If you cannot find your survey, please contact the OCLC Team so we may fax you another copy or verify whether OCLC needs a response from your library.

Serials Reminder

Libraries may exercise the option to renew for one more year of serials subscription services for FY99. New agreements will be in place during FY99 for FY2000 and forward. Watch for a new handbook and further instructions on recompeting FY2000 serials requirements later this year.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ALA Comes to the Nation's Capital

The American Library Association (ALA) held its annual conference in Washington, D.C. this June at the Washington Convention Center. More than 20,000 conferees from all over the world attended, making this the largest ALA event ever. FLICC/FEDLINK used its booth as an opportunity to promote its services and training programs to the federal library community, nonmember libraries, vendors, and foreign visitors. David Pachter, a FEDLINK Network Program Specialist who organized the FLICC/FEDLINK booth, and many other staffers, met with members, vendors, and other visitors in the informal and relaxed atmosphere of the conference. Conference participants who stopped by the booth learned about FEDLINK, asked questions, and mingled with the staff while reviewing FEDLINK's new promotional packet, meeting announcements, newsletters, and calendar of upcoming events. Visitors to the booth took more than 500 sets of materials and 400 FLICC/FEDLINK mouse pads.

Pachter, the driving force behind the success of this exhibit, believes that participating at national conferences is one of the best and most practical mechanisms for familiarizing the information community with FEDLINK. He is grateful to all FFO, FNO, FPE, and C&L staff for their help with the booth. "Their contributions made the FEDLINK exhibit a success," said Pachter.

"This is a great way for us to meet face-to-face with the people we work with every day. The exhibit is also an excellent opportunity to showcase the state-of-the-art software and systems FEDLINK uses to provide services to its members," said Pachter.

Next stop for the FEDLINK exhibit? Pachter is looking forward to setting up at the SLA Conference in Minnesota in June 1999, and possibly at the ALA Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Latest FLICC/FEDLINK Educational Programs on Video

Through a special cooperative agreement with FLICC, the National Library of Education (NLE) has cataloged the video recordings of many FLICC/FEDLINK educational programs and will lend these programs to FEDLINK members through the OCLC Interlibrary Loan Subsystem. NLE will also enclose a copy of the printed resources furnished to participants in the live programs.

Below is a list of the most recent FLICC/FEDLINK programs that are available for Interlibrary Loan through the National Library of Education (OCLC symbol NIE). For the current list of the entire cataloged series in the OLUC (On-line Union Catalog), users can enter the derived search: vid,ta,of,f<F11> or visit the Educational Programs Page on the FLICC Web site.

Networks Telecommunications and Networking Concepts (3/19/98): 1 videotape (2 hours)updates librarians on the latest telecommunication and networking technology. Sponsored by the Alliance of Library Service Networks. librarians.

1998 FLICC Information Technology Update: Metadata 101—Beyond Traditional Cataloging (1/29/98): 4 videotapes (7 hours)provides a primer on current metadata standards and issues from Dublin Core to GILS.

1997 FLICC Symposium on the Information Professional: End-User Training and Support (11/13/97): 4 videotapes (7 hours)discussing the issues surrounding end-user training and practical techniques for being effective instructional librarians.

FEDLINK 1997 Spring OCLC Users Group (5/2/97): 2 videotapes (2 ½ hours)provides important information on new OCLC products and services such as: OCLC's TCP/IP -based telecommunications options; pricing plans for FY98, including cataloging fixed-fee options; OCLC's replacement program; upcoming version of Windows-based software packages; Electronic Collections Online and its preview program; enhancements to the interlibrary loan system; changes to the FEDLINK OCLC training program; and brief updates on other OCLC products and services.

FEDLINK Spring Membership Meeting (5/2/97): 2 videotapes (3 ½ hours)features reports and updates on FEDLINK services, including: enhancement and redesign of the FLICC/FEDLINK Web site; end-user training; FLICC Working Group reports; and updates on current FLICC/FEDLINK projects.

FEDLINK Institute on Library of Congress Subject Cataloging (4/21/97-4/23/97): 8 video tapes (18 hours)a three-day program that offers a fundamental understanding of the basic concept underlying the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and the Library of Congress Classification (LCC). The institute does not cover Dewey Decimal Classification. The institute familiarizes students with Library of Congress (LC) subject cataloging tools sufficiently to use them when conducting LC subject cataloging at their agencies. Senior cataloging specialists conducted the institute.

1997 FLICC Forum on Federal Information Policies: Clear Signals? Telecommunications, Convergence and the Quality of Information (3/6/97): 3 video tapes/resource materials (6 hours)examines the consequences of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and its possible effect on libraries. Distinguished speakers from Congress, agencies, private industry, and public interest groups address the convergence of entertainment and information providers; opportunities for providing universal access to Internet services; the quality of online information resources; and strategies for online searching, information filtering, and streamlining information systems.

1997 FLICC Information Technology Update: Spinning the Intranet Web (1/29/97): 3 video tapes/resource materialsexplores what Intranets are, how they work, and why agencies are creating them. Greg Bean of Johns Hopkins University and Denise Duncan of Logistics Management Inc. explain how to plan, manage, and build Intranets, and representatives from the Naval War College and the FCC demonstrate their Intranets.

Getting the Word Out: Marketing your Library's Information Services (12/10/96): 3 videotapes/ resource materials (6 hours)helps federal libraries to market the value of information services within their own agency and to promote the role of the professional librarian.

Legal Resources on the Internet (12/5/96): 2 videotapes/no resource materials (3 hours)discusses key legal resources available on the Internet and on legislative, executive and judicial bulletin boards. Cosponsored by FLICC and the Special Interest Section (SIS) of the DC Federal Law Librarians Society.

Writing Position Descriptions for Librarians (10/30-10/31/96): 5 videotapes/resource materials (12 hours)teaches librarians about the new OPM classification series to enable them to work with their agency's personnel specialist.

Briefing: FEDLINK's New Technical Processing Services BOA (10/29/96): 3 videotapes/resource materials (5 ½ hours)explains how FEDLINK's newest vendors apply personalized cataloging specifications to current or retrospective conversion cataloging for books, serials, visual materials, sound recordings, computer files, interactive multimedia, musical scores, and maps.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial Staff

FEDLINK Technical Notes is published by the Federal Library and Information Center Committee. Send suggestions of areas for FLICC attention or for inclusion in FEDLINK Technical Notes to:

FLICC was established in 1965 (as the Federal Library Committee) by the Library of Congress and the Bureau of the Budget for the purpose of concentrating the intellectual resources of the federal library and related information community. FLICC's mission is to foster excellence in federal library and information services through interagency cooperation and to provide guidance and direction for the Federal Library and Information Network (FEDLINK).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Return to FLICC Home Page

Go to: Library of Congress Home Page