A BRIGHTPLANET CASE STUDY

Like all states, the South Dakota government is made up of various departments and agencies. Each agency has certain responsibilities from the assessment and collection of tax revenues to the issuance of various licenses and maintenance of state parks. One entity, the South Dakota State Library, is responsible for the proper storage of all government documents and for making them available to its citizenry.

The Problem

Available information is scattered throughout the state. There is at least one Web site for each state agency (over 30 sites in all). In addition, the 6 state universities also provide access to many tens of thousands of documents and the store of documents from the legislature is enormous.

While all this information is available, state citizens are usually unaware of the existence of all the state Web sites. And of those sites they do know, they often don't know which one to visit for specific information. For example, one might expect to find information regarding driver's licenses at the Department of Transportation Web site. Unfortunately, that information is actually handled by the Department of Public Safety. Similarly, information about the Arts was formally handled by the Department of Education, but that responsibility has been moved to the Department of Tourism and State Development in recent years.

BrightPlanet Solution

To make documents easier to find for its citizens, the South Dakota State Library turned to BrightPlanet and its Deep Query Manager/Publisher (DQM/P). The DQM/P solves these problems by performing multiple necessary functions all in one product:

1. It is able to harvest all the documents from each of the state's Web sites.
2. All documents are fully analyzed for content and the DQM/P builds one comprehensive index in one place — no other indexes are required to include all the harvested sites.
3. The DQM/P then places each document within a taxonomical structure (a subject tree by topic).
4. The comprehensive index allows site visitors to search all documents from all sites at one time and from one place.

The foregoing steps are all handled in just one automated operation. After a DQM/P is implemented, site visitors need go to only ONE Web site to access all state documents. One way a site visitor can explore the site is by following the topic structure and working his way down the subject tree. For example, if a visitor clicks on the Agriculture And Food Production link, he has direct access to 300 documents regarding laws and acts pertinent to that topic. He can also click on one of the subtopics, such as Crops and its subtopics to further specialize.

Alternatively, the visitor can enter a query and search any subtopic, its children subtopics, or search the entire site with his query. A visitor can use free text or powerful Boolean operators. The new site is called SODAKLIVE — South Dakota, Land of Infinite Variety Electronically and provides a one-stop source for all state information.

Library and Citizenry Benefits

"People have to go to just one place when they want any state government information", said the State Library Digital Librarian. "They perform a search and click on one of the returned set of links. That takes them directly to the appropriate site without having to know which sites exist in the state and which contain the target information — it's ONE STOP SHOPPING!"

This is important because information is not always where one would anticipate. Now, the location of information and the agency responsible doesn't matter. Site visitors need only go to SODAKLIVE for all their South Dakota state information needs. No longer do they need to visit site after site to find the one responsible for desired information.

Another benefit is that of automatically tracking moving information. Agency responsibilities change from time to time and one agency will sometimes take over one or more responsibilities from another. This can be difficult even for those citizens that actually knew where certain information was kept. Recently, hearing aid dispensers and issues related to podiatry were under the purview of the Department of Commerce and Regulation. That has been moved to the State Department of Health. State History, formally found at the Department of Education and Cultural Affairs, now requires a visitor to go to the Department of Tourism and State Development. According to the Digital Librarian for the state, "Citizens that have successfully found information at one site in the past will visit the site today and cannot find information previously available — it's a moving target". Since implementing a DQM/P, such changes of responsibility and information migration are irrelevant and the State Library site can deliver the proper information to site visitors. "Now, you no longer need to know which state agency to go to", says the Digital Librarian.

The State Library is also responsible for preserving all state documents and this technology further supports their archiving task. As documents move from agency to agency or documents from one administration are removed from a site to make room for documents of the new administration, older documents formerly destroyed or lost can be preserved and are constantly available to the citizenry and researchers.

Finally, the time from harvest to complete information availability is very short and requires minimum personnel. Once the topic structure is created, one individual can perform all harvests and build the entire portal structure, including placing documents in the topic tree and building the entire search index in one or two day's time. Subsequent harvests to maintain document currency are similarly efficient.

Because the number of documents being created continues to grow, the South Dakota State Library had previously been concerned about the number of staff that would be required to keep up with the acquisition, classification, and placement of documents. Now, that process is fully automated and performed in hours rather than months.