Supporting Domain-Specific Digital Libraries In Government Two Case Studies

Government agencies often provide web-accessible collections of documents for use by government employees as well as the general public. In our work, we focus on domain-specific digital libraries where the subject matter of the documents is restricted to the topics of concern in the government work; our goal is to assist government users who are knowledgeable in the domain(s) represented in the collection. We report here on two digital government projects: a project with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service with a focus on providing comprehensive access to documents produced by the agency for Forest Service managers, and a second project with the national health portal in Denmark, sundhed.dk, with a focus on meeting the information needs of family practice physicians as they treat patients. In this chapter, we describe how the use of a digital library application, Metadata++, can improve document and information retrieval, and we explore other aspects that contribute to project success, such as involvement of government partners, agency commitment, technology transfer, and evaluation.