EVALUATING OUR WEB PRESENCE: CHALLENGES, METRICS, RESULTS
Symposium Overview
Elliot R. Siegel, Ph.D.
Associate Director for Health Information Programs
Development
National Library of Medicine
The Internet and the World Wide Web offer all of us here today tremendous opportunities and challenges in providing access to scientific, technical and medical information. We want to provide content that is timely, accurate and understandable; delivered by systems that are friendly and relatively easy to use; and in the final analysis, capable of empowering our users to make informed decisions — especially when health and wellness are at stake.
Upper most in the minds of many of us is the question, "How good a job are we doing?" This evaluation challenge can be especially daunting because the Web environment, itself, imposes a whole new set of constraints – technical, legal, and ethical -- on getting useful feedback. Our users in many instances are anonymous. Privacy protection is essential, especially for certain kinds of content applications, such as patient health information. And just measuring Web traffic and site usage can be complex and controversial, and an evolving state of the art when it comes to making reliable counts and projections.
This Symposium is intended to raise our awareness of these issues – for those not already facing them head-on. For those of us with firsthand experience, we want to share with you what we know and, hopefully, raise the bar on what will become the best practices of tomorrow.
My hat is off to Fred Wood who has set an outstanding table of goodies for us to feast on today. With the help of Kathryn Johnson, Gail Hodge – and of course our speakers, we have an excellent program ahead of us. We cover all the bases, to the extent possible in a one-day meeting. From a technical standpoint alone, we will look at audience measurement and drill downs; user surveys – online and telephone; focus groups; comparative Web site analyses; usability testing; and end-to-end Internet connectivity testing.
We will hear a mix of perspectives. From information providers in both the public and private sectors who are getting the job done, and from members of the consulting community whose business it is to help us do the kinds of evaluations we know are needed.
At the end of the day we will have an opportunity to discuss lessons learned, and to identify the gaps still remaining. Each of our speakers will participate in an open panel discussion. Speakers, please be prepared to identify two or three key ‘take home messages’ from your talks, or points made by others. Audience members, too, will have an opportunity to contribute to the list. Following the Symposium, we will try to pull all this together into a summary report, within a framework that makes sense for federal agencies.
Now let’s get down to business. Your meeting folders contain full bios and abstracts for all of our speakers. It is especially fitting that the person opening our program today is Dr. Donald Lindberg. Besides being the director of the National Library of Medicine for the past 17 years, Dr. Lindberg’s many distinguished career accomplishments and honors -- both in an outside government -- span more than four decades. To mention just a few: He singlehandly brought biomedicine to the White House’s High Performance Computing initiative in the early 1990’s. He went on to lead that overall effort while simultaneously serving as NLM director. He is widely acknowledged to be a founder of the discipline of Medical Informatics.
I should also tell you that it was Dr. Lindberg who first set the wheels in motion that brought us to today’s event. A year and a half ago, he challenged us to evaluate NLM’s Web presence, particularly our new consumer health Web site – Medline Plus, that targets a whole new audience of patients, their families and members of the public. We quickly realized that answering the question, "How good a job are we doing?", required us to develop and experiment with a whole new set of Web evaluation metrics and measures. Good work generates good company, and this soon led to the formation of a new CENDI project that brought together several like-minded member agencies. Today’s Symposium brings closure to that work.
Now, please join me in welcoming our Keynote speaker, Dr. Donald Lindberg.
