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Colorado By The Numbers (CBN) represents an attempt to provide valuable government statistical information to as many citizens of Colorado as possible. In addition to distributing this information widely over the Internet, the authors of CBN are devoted to helping users find statistics on subjects of interest. This latter process we call "providing subject access."
When CBN began, the authors provided subject access to CBN information through the opening menu of subject terms on the CBN homepage. As CBN grew to include hundreds of pages, the authors saw the need to use additional tools to improve subject access. One of these tools is a search engine, which allows users to retrieve information by entering keywords that occur in CBN pages. The search engine simply indexes all of the words that occur on each CBN page.
Yet some users may need to find statistics that are not located under one of the subject terms on the CBN homepage, or they may wish to search by words that do not occur "naturally" in CBN pages. For example, many pages in CBN contain population figures, but not all of them carry the word "population," and not all of them are located in the area called "Population." To allow users to retrieve all of the pages that contain statistics on their topic, we have added additional keywords to most CBN pages.
For example, to allow users to find every page that carries population statistics, including pages that are not found under the "Population" heading on the homepage and that do not contain the word "population," we have added the keyword "population" to all pages containing population data. We have placed keywords like this in an area of the pages called the META Tag. The META Tag contains information that allows search engines to find and retrieve pages, but without showing this information to users.
This means that when you search for a term using the CBN search engine, and you look on each page for the keyword that you searched by, the keyword may not be visible on some pages. Instead, the keyword may be hidden in the META Tag on these pages. To see the keyword, on the top menu bar of your web browser click on "View," and then click on "Document Source." This will show you the HTML code that produces the look of the webpage you are viewing. Scroll down a bit, and you will see the word META. Nearby this word, you will see a list of keywords, and the keyword you searched by should be among them.
As an example, here's a typical META tag that contains keywords. This META Tag comes from the CBN page called Banking Statistics:
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="bank economy economic business finance financial">
If you had searched for CBN pages using the keyword "financial," you would have retrieved the Banking Statistics page. If you look at this page, though, the word "financial" does not appear on its surface. Yet if you click in your web browser top menu bar on "View," then click on "Document Source," and look in the words listed in the META Tag, you will see the word "financial." It is this "hidden" keyword in the META Tag that would have allowed you to find this page.
Our goals in adding subject keywords to CBN pages include using a wide vocabulary, and keeping terms consistent. In choosing keywords, we have tried to employ a wide variety of terms that people use in everyday life, in addition to more formal words commonly used to identify subject. Thus, we have added many synonyms, or words with the same meaning, to the CBN pages. For example, in the sample META tag above, we have included three words that roughly mean "business": "economy," "economic," and "business." Moreover, we have tried to add these terms consistently, so that people who search by different terms that mean the same thing will retrieve the same pages. For example, we have tried to add the terms "economy," "economic," and "business" to every page that carries statistics about business, so that people searching by any of these words will retrieve the same number of pages.
Because we want to use keywords that people commonly think of when searching for statistics, and because we want to keep making CBN better and better, we welcome your suggestions of additional keywords to add to our pages. Please send your suggestions -- and please mention that these are "keyword suggestions for Colorado By The Numbers" -- to us at the Government Publications Library at the University of Colorado at Boulder, by telephone at (303) 492-8834; by postal mail at Campus Box 184, Boulder, CO 80309-0184; or by e-mail at: govpubs@stripe.colorado.edu .
Rob Richards, professional research assistant at the Government Publications Library at the University of Colorado at Boulder, adds keywords to the CBN pages, and wrote this document.
