A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

   FOR RELEASE                                Contact:  David Thomas    September 19, 1995                                 (202) 401-1579

Department's National Library of Education Unveils New World Wide Web Home Page

The Education Department's National Library of Education has a new home page on the World Wide Web (WWW). The home page is the entrance to the department's "Online Library," an electronic collection of useful information for teachers, parents, policymakers, researchers and others concerned with education.

The WWW has grown phenomenally in the year and a half since the department's original home page was created. The Online Library has nearly doubled in size and now contains more than 11,000 files, ranging from short grant announcements and news releases to the full text of major department publications, plus lots of information on key initiatives such as GOALS 2000, family involvement, and technology.

Public use of the Online Library has nearly tripled in the last year. In August, the system received more than 750,000 file/menu requests from Internet users in 71 countries on six continents. Frequent visitors come not only from universities and government agencies, but increasingly from state K-12 education networks, community freenets, and commercial networks such as America Online and Prodigy -- an indication that individuals and families are now using the library.

In January, Internet World named the department's Internet site as one of the most useful educational resources on the Internet. PC Week [August, 1995] said the ED WWW site is the place to start for information about educational technology. America Online and Apple's eWorld network selected it as a featured database for their users. PointCom, a major Internet reviewer of WWW sites, rates it "excellent." Many new Internet books recommend it for its content and design.

At the opening session of the Federal Webmaster Workshop in July, David Lytel of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy cited the department's WWW version of the Teacher's Guide to the U.S. Department of Education as an excellent example of how to make a complex body of information appear simple and understandable to an agency's customers.

The department's home page extends that approach to the entire Online Library. It organizes a large body of information clearly and logically, making it easy for visitors to find the information they need.

One powerful feature lets a visitor search the full text of the entire library for a word or phrase. For example, a search for "family involvement," returns numerous references, including full-text publications, press releases, bibliographies, and research and statistics on the topic.

Mouse-equipped visitors can click on a U.S. map to get a list of resources and services in their state or click on a department organization chart to go to a main office home page. The system provides a text-only equivalent for all graphical features to accommodate visually-impaired users and the still substantial portion of the education community with slow modems, older equipment, or text-only Web browsers.

The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for the new home page is http://www.ed.gov/. For more information, call Keith Stubbs at (202) 219-1803 or send Internet E-mail to webmaster@inet.ed.gov/.