To quote the report – Government to close 551 websites – on the BBC News Site:

Hundreds of [UK] government websites are to be shut down “to make access to information easier” for people.

Of the current 951 sites, only 26 will definitely stay, 551 will close and hundreds more will be reviewed.

Instead government information online will be streamlined through two main sites – Directgov and Business Link.

In the Government Press Release on their progress report on ‘Transformational Government: enabled by technology’ they say:

Use of Government IT has now reached a critical mass and ordinary citizens are at the heart of this new way of working. Learners have been some of the biggest beneficiaries of technology investment.

Not normally a trumpet blower for the British Government, I do welcome this blast of common sense that seems to be emanating from some of it’s web-aware members. At last the penny has dropped that the ordinary citizen has very little idea of the internal structures of, and relationships between, government departments and their responsibilities. Traditionally these structures and responsibilities have enforced a maze of different access points to government services on to a bewildered and confused public.

So a couple [is that still one too many? - or am I being a bit uncharitable] sites to visit to get to all national government services and information. If they are to their word of their report this move towards ’supersites’ should be welcomed.

The next trick will be to get the other 400 plus local government organizations to get their act together in a similar way.

Not being sure of the ’shifted by Christmas holidays’ day for my refuse collection, I thought I would demonstrate to my family the power of the Interweb in rapidly obtaining answers to such simple questions. My first try was the site for the County Council that covers my area. That resulted in finding out that refuse was actually the responsibility of my District Council – interestingly they only provided telephone numbers for these councils, a web link would have been ‘really’ handy at this point. The District Council site then informed me that they had delegated it to a sub-contracting commercial company, and it was their website that finally gave me the information I needed. So I got what I needed, but not a very impressive demonstration. Where I live should not impact where and what questions I ask. OK the answers may well be locally based, but people would be better served by a local government supersite – or better still why, for citizen communications, does there need to be a local/national differentiation?

Of course there is a lesson for libraries in this, as demonstrated by looking at what people type in to OPAC prompts. Dave Pattern’s recent posting on failed searches gives an interesting insight to this – ‘renew’ and ‘metalib’ being numbers five and six in the hit parade of failed OPAC keyword searches. Do they think it is an OPAC or a library help system? – should it have to matter in an ideal world?

How many library sites assume that it’s users have an understanding of which of the array of available sources it provides access to will contain the information they are trying to discover? How few actually do? How many would assume that it was the job of the library to hide all that complexity from them?

Answers on a postcard, or blog comment if you prefer……

(Photo taken by powerbooktrance displayed in Flickr)

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