1211.0 - Data Communication - Emerging International Trends and Practices of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006  
ARCHIVED ISSUE Released at 11:30 AM (CANBERRA TIME) 10/02/2006  First Issue
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Contents >> Introduction

INTRODUCTION



In a survey conducted by Statistics Canada (Roy, 2005) on the twenty two National Statistical Offices (NSOs), mainly from Europe and North America, participating in the September 2005 International Conference on Marketing and Output Databases on practices in data dissemination, a number of interesting trends have been identified. The more noteworthy trends are as follows:

  • almost all NSOs are in different stages of migrating from a paper-based publishing regime to an electronic publishing regime;
  • the World Wide Web is predominately used as the tool for electronic publishing;
  • about two thirds of the responding NSOs have developed a strategic vision to guide the development of their web sites;
  • the top five web site concerns nominated by NSOs were, in order of importance: development of web site content and related standards; implementation of information management and data presentation tools; on-line presentation of meta data; facilitation of electronic publishing and measuring satisfaction of web site visitors;
  • the top five web site concerns raised by web site visitors were, in order of importance: ease of web site navigation; effectiveness of on-line search capabilities; availability of regional level data; documented statistical methods used in analyses and effectiveness of on-line information retrieval;
  • over half of the NSOs predicted an increasing pace with the following developments in the coming years: streamlining and improving web site navigation; development of thematic based web site structure; and improving the search capabilities of web sites;
  • only about one third of the NSOs have developed publishing standards for web site information; and
  • about 80% of NSOs have made the transition to providing all published information on the web site free of charge - about half of those who have done so had also reported rising servicing costs due to increased access to information.

2 Whilst the findings of the survey covered many different aspects of the business of publishing/disseminating/communicating statistics, the one common theme amongst them seems to be making the NSO web sites an effective medium for disseminating statistical information. No doubt the NSOs will conduct their own investigation and research into how to publish effectively on the internet, it is, however, believed that a lot can be learnt from newspapers. After all, their business is in disseminating news effectively using the mass media and many, if not all, have made a very successful transition from paper to web publishing. One reason for their success is that, when they first used the internet, they did not produce a PDF of the newspaper on the web site but rather used the power and capability of the internet to hotlink and bundle related stories together.


3 Whilst some producers of statistics may think that their job is done by publishing the information on the web site, this paper argues that the job of a statistician is not done until the messages in the statistical release, together with the limitations of the information, are communicated to the users, in order to assist them make informed judgements about fitness of purpose of the statistics for relevant decision making. How statisticians present the statistical stories, the statistical data and meta data will largely determine how effective the information is communicated to the users.


4 In this paper, we discuss the strategies and techniques used by the ABS to improve the on-line communication of statistics (Tam, 2005a).



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