When the state prepared to launch its new portal, MyCalifornia, it dawned on the management team that the states librarians would be a logical choice to organize the hundreds of thousands of pages of information contained on the Web site. Although upon reflection, they seem like a natural resource for such a critical job, no other state seems to have used its librarians so extensively in a portal project.
"When we sat and thought about what the architecture should look like," said Director of E-government Arun Baheti, "we started thinking about who could help us. Someone remembered that the State Library once owned the entire Web site and all of a sudden the thought hit us - who could better help organize information and make it easier to find than librarians? The more we thought about it, the more we knew it was the obvious solution."
According to John Jewel, chief of state library services, librarians generally are not given to self-promotion and, consequently, are often overlooked as a resource. "There are more libraries than there are McDonalds," he said. "But we never came up with the Golden Arches. People visit libraries more than three times as often as they go to the movies."
At least in California, librarians have been discovered and handed the significant task of identifying, organizing, categorizing and managing information that appears on the states Web site. "Our focus was on what information people wanted, and how it was structured and arranged," Jewel explained, "so that they could find it more effectively."
Because the portal was created in a record 120 days, the effort was intense. Led by a State Library team of six, additional employees from the librarys publications section, research bureau, development division and other sections also participated in the project. Throughout the Thanksgiving weekend before the Monday launch, Jewel said the library building buzzed with activity around the clock.
Kristine Ogilvie, senior librarian for public services and an avid member of the team, worked on Thanksgiving Day to meet the deadline. "It was the true Web consciousness that we talk about," she admitted. "I think that we became the Web portal."
The librarians were charged with identifying what information the public wanted. Jewel said that agency managers were asked to do an internal assessment of what the public needed and wanted from their divisions. In addition, Jewel reminded them that insights could be found at all levels of the organization. "When you are looking for frequently asked questions," he said, "ask the people at the front desk, the telephone operators and the people who open the mail. I dont think theres anywhere else in an organization where people know more about whats being asked."
The goal was to get people to the information they wanted in no more than three clicks. This required that key words be linked to each other as meta tags, residing behind the on-screen information. For example, someone looking for the states program to retire smog- producing cars can be search with words like "clunker" or "smog" or "registration," and other similar terms.
The librarians also looked at how an agencys information was presented. Aware that bureaucrats have a tendency to write bureaucratically, Jewel said the team did some editing. "We tried to look at what language would allow the material to be found not only by the categories, but also by the description. Our charge was to put it in language that people use."
Baheti is thrilled with the states newly discovered resource. "The last thing that you want to do is have a bunch of bureaucrats or technical professionals thinking they understand how people look for information," he said. "Clearly, its not our area of expertise."
In developing the states Web site, Baheti freely admits to "borrowing" from the best of other states practices. The librarians followed Bahetis lead and traveled the information highway. "We looked at all 49 Web sites," Jewel said. "We went into each category and asked if it made sense. We knew there wasnt perfect answer but we focused on what made good groupings."
Ogilvie headed up the team that assessed state sites. "We took a question and ran the question in each state to see how easy the answer was to find," she explained, "just like a person would do walking into a library. When it became frustrating, we wrote it off as a potential model."
"We looked at items in terms of cataloging and arranging. What was it they had in common, what was different or unique," Jewel explained. "We were not looking at the world in an abstract fashion." The team considered the needs of various groups of users such as parents, teachers, administrators and businesses. Each category, he said, had to be "viewed with a different lens."
Throughout the portal development, librarians met with the team from the governors office, private sector partners such as Deloitte Consulting and Roundarch, and representatives from the states Department of Information Technology. Not only was the project subject to a tight timeline, it was further complicated by Californias sheer size. As the worlds sixth largest economy, the state requires a full time, year-around Legislature and manages 250 departments, agencies, boards and commissions spread out from the Oregon border to Mexico.
To mitigate the complexity of the states structure, Baheti established an ongoing series of workshops in which agencies tell librarians about their areas of responsibility. "We look at their documents and make them more retrievable from the users point of view," Jewel said, adding that agencies are experts in their fields and provide the critical content for their Web pages.
After the 120-day "miracle" -- as some of the participants refer to the initial portal project -- the work of refinement began. Jewel said they now have time to analyze what the team got right and what they may have missed as the portal continues to develop. "We can ask how can we take you to the next stage? No Web site is ever complete," he said. "Working with IT people and management clearly involves the CIOs and the webmasters. It has to involve the program people from an agency. Its an excellent opportunity for interaction."
Baheti, who continues to infuse the portal project with enthusiasm and new features, has high praise for the states librarians. He claims to have happily off-loaded the most "difficult and overwhelming task" in portal development. Next on the librarians list of Web projects, according to Baheti, is developing strategies for collaborative filtering of information. "This is cutting edge stuff that I think the librarians will have a great time with," he said. "Library science has come a very long way since the days of the Dewy Decimal System."
