I came across an interesting article in Information World Review on the subject of e-Government. The UK prime minister has set a target to ensure e-Government by the year 2005. It cites, as an example of some of the pitfalls to be encountered along the road, the case of the PRO 1901 Census site. This ambitious digitisation project, designed to make the entire 1901 census searchable and accessible to the public, crashed almost as soon as it was launched, due to higher than expected demand.
The article makes the point that e-Government is not easily definable. It takes many forms and will work across many platforms. Clearly there are technology issues, but there are also the human and information aspects
I came across an interesting article in Information World Review on the subject of e-Government. The UK prime minister has set a target to ensure e-Government by the year 2005. It cites, as an example of some of the pitfalls to be encountered along the road, the case of the PRO 1901 Census site. This ambitious digitisation project, designed to make the entire 1901 census searchable and accessible to the public, crashed almost as soon as it was launched, due to higher than expected demand.

The article makes the point that e-Government is not easily definable. It takes many forms and will work across many platforms. Clearly there are technology issues, but there are also the human and information aspects. There does seem to be a lot of investment in the technolgy side of this grand project, but is enough attention being paid to the other aspects?

These are interesting times for Information Professionals. The technology is available now to enable the sorts of projects that librarians have dreamt about doing for years, but do we have the opportunity to run with these projects? We have lots to contribute, but is there a seat for us at the planning meeting? I woul be interested to hear of peoples experience on this.