Products

This section presents the existing geographic data, publications, news articles, the GAP home page, and meetings, symposia, and workshops that have resulted as GAP products. Not accounted for here is the effect GAP is having on building institutional relationships around information. Although the results from the GAP state-level partnerships are easily of equal value to more tangible products such as data, the products resulting from better integrated institutional relationships are more complex, more difficult to quantify, and require a great deal of time and effort.

World Wide Web Home Page

The GAP Home Page has become an important and well-used source of information. The GAP Home Page became operational October 1994. As of September 30, 1995, there has been a total of 169,254 individual uses of this resource as measured by "hits." A "hit" is any single request, such as requesting an image, some text, or downloading an entire data set. There has been an average of 14,104 hits per month since October 1994, and an average of 18,794 per month since March of 1995. Since the GAP Home Page became operational, it has been accessed from 10,364 different computer terminals, averaging access from 864 different computer terminals per month.

Of all "hits," 67 percent originated from the U.S., about 8 percent originated from outside the U.S., and about 25 percent were of unknown country origin (Figure 8). The greatest demand (47%) came from users affiliated with educational institutions (".edu"), about 15 percent came from those affiliated with government institutions (".gov"), 14 percent came from non-affiliated U.S. users (".us"), another 12 percent came from the commercial sector (".com"), almost 9 percent came from miscellaneous net locations (".net"), about 2 percent came from non-commercial organizations (".org"), another 1 percent came from users affiliated with the military (".mil") (Figure 9). The distribution of "hits" from other countries can be seen in Figure 10. The amount of "hits" per month on the GAP Home Page is shown in Figure 11.

Figure 8. GAP home page origin of access.

Figure 9. GAP home page user affiliation.

Figure 10. GAP home page access by foreign users.

Figure 11. GAP home page access by month.