---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Memory Fellows <AMFELLOWS@RS8.LOC.GOV>
Poster: "Judith K. Graves" <jgrav@LOC.GOV>
Subject: presidential papers
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Everyone,
This just came over our internal listserv. I haven't checked it out, but
the source is solid.
Judy
Federal Computer Week 9/13/99
GPO delivering presidential papers online
by Margret Johnston
<SNIP>
During the Truman administration, the National Historical Publications
Commission recognized that the government had no official means of
preserving the president=92s public papers and came up with an idea that
delighted historians and librarians nationwide. Noting the need for
the uniform preservation of speeches, press releases, proclamations and
other documents, the commission recommended the establishment of an
official presidential papers project that would do for the executive
branch what the Congressional Record does for the legislative branch.
Now, more than 40 years since the publication of the first volume of the
Public Papers of the Presidents, the Government Printing Office hopes
again to delight historians and librarians=97and anyone else with a World
Wide Web browser=97by making the series available online through GPO
Access
http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs
T.C. Evans, assistant director of GPO=92s Office of Electronic Information
Dissemination Services, said focus groups at recent meetings in New
Orleans and Kansas City asked GPO to add the Public Papers of the
Presidents, a 3-inch-thick volume in its printed form, to its Web site.
The site already provides mouse-click access to the Federal Register,
the Code of Federal Regulations, the Commerce Business Daily and masses
of other government publications. =93One question I always ask people at
those forums is, What don=92t we have that they would like to see?=94 Evans
said. =93[The Public Papers of the Presidents] was one of those items.=94
Eventually, all volumes of the Public Papers of the Presidents, from
Truman papers forward, will be available at the GPO Access site. But so
far, the new database, added Sept. 1, offers only one volume of
President Clinton=92s papers, covering the first half of 1997. Despite
the relatively short time span, the database contains an enormous amount
of information, including items ranging from obscure statements, such as
Clinton=92s proclamation on Mother=92s Day, to more serious events, such as
a transcript of a news conference Clinton held with Russian President
Boris Yeltsin in Helsinki, Finland. GPO worked with the National
Archives and Records Administration, the longtime publisher of the print
version of the Public Papers of the Presidents, to design the look of
the addition to GPO Access. The papers can be searched, or users can
choose a topic from six categories. The site includes photos and a
name index that lists all of the people Clinton mentioned publicly and
links to the speech or document in which he mentioned them. GPO runs
GPO Access on two Web servers, five Common Gateway Interface script
servers and 26 database servers, and it didn=92t have to add any hardware
to accommodate the presidential papers, said Joel Reeves, chief of the
PostScript Service Section at GPO. =93The architecture allows us to add
new products to existing servers without adding new hardware,=94 Reeves
said. But with all the searching that users do, it helps that the
architecture includes an F5 Networks Inc. Big/IP, which provides dynamic
load balancing to keep traffic flowing smoothly. The controller sends
search queries to the server that is least busy and sends no queries to
servers that are down, Reeves said.
It is an improvement over the =93round robin=94 feature of the domain name
service that GPO Access used before installing the Big/IP controller in
March, Reeves said. That solution sent queries to servers consecutively
regardless of how busy the servers were or whether they were down.
Evans said load balancing is one of the most critical functions of the
site, especially as GPO attempts to keep up with growing demand. In a
typical month, he said, 21 million documents are downloaded from any of
the 1,200 databases GPO hosts. GPO also recently doubled the number of
T-1 data lines needed to maintain adequate network capacity, Evans said.
Evans said GPO has short-term plans for GPO Access to add more features
and functions to the site. GPO technicians are adding meta tags that
provide identifying keywords to the top of all Hypertext Markup Language
documents. That will result in better search results because the search
engine will not have to scan documents from top to bottom when looking
for a match. Other plans call for GPO Access to offer a new children=92s
page, which Evans said would be designed to help elementary and
secondary students learn how government works.
<SNIP>
-------------------------------------------------------
Judith K. Graves
Educational Services
National Digital Library Program
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C. 20540-1320
jgrav@loc.gov (V)202/707-2562 (F) 202/252-3173
http://learning.loc.gov/learn/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 04 2000 - 12:24:27 EST