Catering to Government--Designing Implementing Customer-Centric Services

摘要

The Internet & the World Wide Web provide access to unprecedented amounts of information in unprecedented ways. So much information in fact that the challenge has become how to tease exactly what we are looking for out of the pile. Robert Harris likens the Internet to going to a grocery store magazine rack, closing one's eyes and grabbing a publication--one is just as likely to pick up the Inquirer as Newsweek or Harper's. (Harris, 1997). Besides the issue of quality that his comment implies, findingprecisely what we are looking for is the concern at hand. The advent of my library's online public access catalog (OPAC) was greeted with enthusiasm. Here was another way to share access to information with citizens and staff alike. Management, however,asked a key question: couldn't the OPAC incorporate geo-referencing and provide access to information based on geographical subsets of Maryland? After all, we manage the natural and living resources of the State of Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay--realestate if you will. Even though what we manage is pretty well covered by conventional subject headings--fishes, streams, forests, recreation, human impact on land and water through recreation and development--spatially, geographically, we can't always find what we need. And, even though geography is covered in subject headings --Chesapeake Bay (Maryland and Virginia), Maryland and it's counties and towns--these are political subdivisions. Mother nature makes her own boundaries. One of those naturally occurring boundaries is a watershed. A watershed is all of the land area that drains into a body of water; the watershed for a major river may encompass a number of smaller watersheds that are ultimately combined. If you live in the region stretching fromCooperstown New York to Virginia (including the District of Columbia), you live in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed--a 64,000 sq. mile drainage basin. Watersheds can serve as units of measurement and of management. There are smaller watersheds within the Bay watershed, and, for our purposes, we chose to use eight-digit watershed units of which there are one hundred and thirty-eight in Maryland.