GPO-GATE - UNIVERSITY-OF-CALIFORNIA, SAN-DIEGO NEW GATEWAY TO ELECTRONIC GOVERNMENT INFORMATION

Over the past year, a team of librarians and computer analysts at the University of California (UC), San Diego developed a new interface for accessing the Government Printing Office's WAIS databases, collective ly known as GPO Access. GPO Access has been an important development i n the delivery of government information. UC San Diego's new World Wid e Web interface, called GPO Gate, provides a powerful, user-friendly m ethod of searching and retrieving full-text government information fro m GPO access. GPO Gate is now the University of California's system-wi de gateway for GPO Access. The GPO Gate team instituted two mechanisms to monitor database usage: a user-tracking system and a user survey. The user-tracking system logs the number of uses, searches, and retrie vals by domain type and identifies users by the database used. Since i ts inception in August 1995, use of GPO Gate has increased dramaticall y. Much of the increase can be attributed to searches and retrievals f rom the Federal Register. The largest single user group is composed of commercial users. The increased use of GPO Gate has many implications for public service related to government documents, including an expa nsion of the number of users, the need for reference providers to bett er understand computer hardware and software, and confusion among user s caused by rapid changes in the delivery of government information.