national crosswalk service center

Annual Activity Report July 1, 2003 - June 30, 2004

The center's mission is to maximize the effective and efficient use of occupational information by providing specialized occupational tools (files, reports, software) and technical assistance to users and producers of occupational information.

Annual Activity Report

National Crosswalk Service Center

July 1, 2003-June 30, 2004

Background

In the early 1980s, the National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee (NOICC – now defunct) recognized the value of establishing a national service center to provide technical assistance in the use of occupational and training classifications and related data. This center, the National Crosswalk Service Center was established in Iowa in April 1983. The Employment and Training Administration of the Department of Labor has furnished funding for operation of the center since July 1997.

This document is the latest in a series of annual reports on that center’s activities (visit http://www.xwalkcenter.org/xwrepo.html for reports for selected earlier years). Funding flows from the Employment and Training Administration through the ALMIS Resource Center (ARC, formerly the ALMIS Database Maintenance Consortium). State ALMIS Database administrators are now a major customer group for the NCSC.

Objectives

The Employment and Training Administration, through a grant to the ALMIS Resource Center, desires to make a variety of products and services available to the State Employment Security Agencies and other customers. Through this grant for operation of the National Crosswalk Service Center, ETA expects to realize the following objectives:

1) Work with consortium members to establish a single point of contact for technical support to assist the states in their development of the ALMIS Database.

2) Provide a conduit for information and data into and out of the Workforce Information System.

3) Provide a one-stop resource for classification and crosswalk resources.

4) More fully exploit Internet communication to share files, ideas, feedback, etc. among producers and users of occupational, training and economic information.

NCSC Utilization

A significant portion of NCSC resources is devoted to product development. This frequently involves downloading data files developed by federal agencies, and reformatting them for use in the ALMIS Database or other application. The NCSC creates relatively little original file content. Rather, federal agencies furnish most of the raw material for the resources distributed by the NCSC.

Ultimately, file distribution, rather than file development, is the best and most quantifiable measure of the level of service provided by the center. The NCSC has adopted two measures of the center’s utilization by its customers: files downloaded and user requests. The former measure indicates the volume of products supplied; the latter provides something of a measure of the number of customers served. Both measures indicate significant annual increases during the period covered by this report.

File Downloads

Early in the center’s history, tracking of products delivered to customers was relatively simple. Each request, received via mail or telephone, was recorded, and the resulting shipment or other service was recorded. When the center started operating a dial-up electronic bulletin board system in 1989, staff could easily analyze product delivery through the service’s usage logs. The primary delivery of NCSC products and services now occurs over the Internet.

Counts of files downloaded may present the best picture of the center’s delivery of services. This count has risen steadily since the center started delivering files through its Internet FTP server in late 1997. For the period covered by this report, the number of files downloaded rose by 91 percent to slightly more than 72,000.

In response to customer feedback, in April 2001 the NCSC changed its server configuration to make the downloadable files both more visible and more accessible. The files on the center’s FTP server are also available through the World Wide Web protocol (http). NCSC staff had received a number of messages indicating that some customers could not connect to the FTP server. This inability to connect could have several causes, ranging from their own browser settings to security set up by their host agency or Internet Service Provider. Adding the http protocol made the server’s files available to virtually everyone who couldn’t connect to the FTP service.

The NCSC also maintains a Google™ search of its web site. Since the files on the FTP server are also available through the web protocol and are included in the NCSC Internet domain, this search also searches their content. (NOTE: Search engines must examine the content of the server’s files in order to include them in the general Internet search results. The NCSC removed over 75,000 instances of file access by the Google and Inktomi search agents from the logs before usage was analyzed. Had these entries not been removed, the count of files downloaded would have been that much greater.)

Over 6,600 different files were downloaded during the year. Some highlights:

Number of user sessions	24,494
Number of unique Internet addresses	10,727
Number of files downloaded/viewed	72,790
Bytes downloaded	67,959,736,165

Downloads by subject area

An analysis of the types of files downloaded by NCSC customers indicates that, while the center’s support for the ALMIS database accounts for a majority of the files downloaded, there is still significant demand for other type of files. For example, while OES wage files are formatted for use with the ALMIS database, the data are also available in a more generic format suitable for downloading for use outside the database.

The distribution in the graph below relates to the 72,790 file downloads during the year. Over 6,600 distinct files were downloaded during the period. Over 6,300 of these files were downloaded ten or fewer times. A listing of the individual files with a significant number of downloads is included in Appendix A.

Since support for the ALMIS Database is a significant activity, a look at the types of ALMIS Database files downloaded highlights the areas in which the center should concentrate its efforts. The total downloads of ALMIS Database related files more than doubled from the previous year.

Although the majority of files downloaded are state-specific data files, the distribution of downloads by ALMIS Database version is significant. The number of files related to each version of the database rose from the previous year. However, the portion of downloads related to the most recent database version (2.2) dropped slightly while the portions for earlier database versions all rose. These changes may reflect the discovery of the ALMIS Database files by those outside the ALMIS Database community. Downloads of state-specific data files also point to that conclusion. For example, 228 Alaska-specific files were downloaded during the year. (See Appendix B for counts of downloads of state-specific files.) Fewer than ten files were updated during the period; most of the downloads appear to have be done by someone other than the ALMIS Database administrator for Alaska.

ALMIS Database File Downloads

by Database Version

Database Version	2002-03 Downloads	Percent	2003-04 Downloads	Percent	Percent Change
1.1	1,659	24.3	2,286	25.7	37.8
2.0	657	9.6	1,199	13.5	82.5
2.1	508	7.5	923	10.4	81.7
2.2	3,991	58.6	4,480	50.4	12.3
Total	6,815	100.0	8,888	100.0	30.4

An analysis of visits from other countries also indicates use of files from outside the ALMIS Database community. During the period covered by this report, the server was visited by users from 129 countries (a list of visits by country can be found in Appendix C). About 15 percent of all visits were from outside the United States. Users have been referred to the NCSC server by the French, German, Canadian, British, Australian and other versions of the Google search site. Not all of these visits resulted in file downloads, but they do indicate the increasingly international reach of the internet.

User Requests

As was stated, tracking customer requests is relatively easy when a service has a limited product range and few delivery options. That was the case during the early years of the NCSC, when mailing products to them filled customer requests. This was complicated somewhat in 1989 when the center began operating a dial-up electronic bulletin board system. These systems were popular for several years, and their use paralleled the current use of the Internet in many ways. Tracking customer requests was still relatively simple, since individual dial-up sessions, including user names, and file downloads were tracked in the system’s log. The introduction of the center’s Internet server in late 1997 made tracking more problematic. Files were delivered to mostly anonymous users, and tracking individual sessions through the server’s logs is more difficult. Nonetheless, it’s worthwhile to attempt to estimate the number of user requests as one measure of the center’s level of activity.

For the purpose of this analysis, all files over 4 KB in size downloaded or viewed from a single internet address in one day was considered a request. This is analogous to earlier request counts in which a single request could have included multiple printed reports or files on tape or diskette. It’s important to acknowledge some degree of imprecision in these estimates, since the analysis depends on combining the server’s HTTP and FTP services’ logs and analyzing the resulting 46 MB file. Although this imprecision does exist, consistency over the years in the definitions and analysis used, and awareness of factors, such as file views by search engines, should allow for an accurate portrait of both trends and levels of service.

While the general trend in the number of requests is upward, it doesn’t closely parallel the number of files downloaded. The estimated number of requests exhibited little change between 1999 and 2002, and then exhibited significant increases the next two years.

Although the bulk of product delivery occurs over the Internet, the NCSC continues to receive requests through e-mail and telephone calls. Such contact results in several hundred instances of custom product development, referral to existing products and web site enhancements each year. Custom products developed in response to requests are documented and made available to all customers. While the anonymous nature of the act of downloading files from the NCSC’s Internet server makes it difficult to identify the center’s customers, a sampling of the companies, organizations and individuals who have requested information from the center illustrates the types of organizations that utilize the center’s services.

A sampling of the customers who requested information from the NCSC through e-mail during the period covered by this report are:

ACT, Inc.

Vocational Economics, Inc.

DSC Directional Services Corp.

Centris Group

Nashville Area APO

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Workforce Information Group, Inc.

Maricopa Community Colleges

Macomb Community College

Washington State University

Lingnan University (Hong Kong)

CONAD Research Corporation

proMENTE.org (Bosnia and Herzegovina)

Work Statement Activity

Support the ALMIS Database Maintenance Consortium

¨ Attended consortium meetings in August (Portland ME), November (Atlanta) and April (Tampa). At each meeting, staff presented updates on the center’s activities and worked with all subcommittees but primarily with the Education and Communication and Database Structure committees, and with other groups as needed.

¨ Developed content, files, and other materials for the Applied ALMIS Database training class. Participated in delivery of material at the class in Raleigh. (June)

¨ Made presentation on NCSC resources for ALMIS Database. Administrators at the ALMIS Database Seminar in Atlanta. (November)

¨ Maintained ALMIS Database Administrator communication list. (July-June)

¨ Prepared an annual report detailing NCSC activities and an analysis of trends in usage by customers. Report was distributed to the consortium, ETA and published on the NCSC web site. (October)

Support State staff in their efforts to populate and manage the ALMIS Database

¨ Updated ALMIS Database Update Calendar web pages. (September, October, November, December, March, April, June).

¨ Downloaded, formatted and provided monthly updates of national data for the CES and LABFORCE tables. (July-June).

¨ Downloaded and provided comprehensive CES table developed by BLS. (December, February, March, April, June)

¨ Downloaded, formatted and provided monthly updates to the content of the CPI table. (July-June)

¨ Updated prototype content for URL table containing web addresses for state LMI pages. (July-December)

¨ Provided national Covered Employment and Wages (ES-202) data for 2001 formatted for use in the ALMIS Database, along with a compatible NAICCODE table developed in cooperation with the consortium. (November)

¨ Downloaded, reformatted and provided 2002 OES wage data. (December)

¨ Updated a variety of non-Department of Labor ALMIS tables:

o Census population estimates. (September, December, April)

o Bureau of Economic Analysis personal income estimates. (January, May)

o Department of Defense military separations file. (April)

o Census income estimates. (December)

Provide support to the Career OneStop Consortium, ETA and other users

¨