In reviewing the practices reported in the research interviews, it became apparent that there were some marked variations in the kinds of practices across these types of organizations. In order to track these variations, the text of the interviews was coded according to the kinds of practices mentioned. A large number of practices were described and coded this way. However, many of them were mentioned only once or twice over all interviews, so they were not useful for comparison across types. For the analysis discussed here, only the practices with several occurrences were used.

Using the coded text material, it was then possible to tally the references to particular practices and relate that tally to the type of organization. These tallies can then be considered a rough indicator of the prevalence or importance of that type of practice in that organization. Such a counting is at best an approximation of prevalence of a practice, since a single mention may in fact involve a substantial effort, and many mentions merely embellishments of a small effort. Overall, however, the differences in where the particular practices are mentioned does provide some insight into the possible relationships between access practices and the organizational setting in which they occur. The results of this analysis are shown in Figure 1 below.

This figure shows the percentage of the total occurrences of the practice for each type of organization in which it occurred. That is, the height of the bars for each of the types of practice in the figure add to 100%. If a bar does not appear for a type of organization in the space for a practice that means that practice was not reported for that type of organization. For example in Figure 1, practices related to migration and formats have two equal height bars (50%), one each for Community and Library type organizations. In the interviews, practices related to migration and formats were reported 10 times, five each for Libraries and Communities and none for the others. This way of recording the results normalizes for the different number of organizations in each category.

In spite of the roughness of this type of tally, the patterns in Figure 1 do suggest some useful observations. The most obvious is that practices do vary considerably across these types. The library-type organizations appear to have the most prevalence of these notable practices overall. Efforts with respect to proactive acquisition, metadata, and understanding user demand seemed particularly valuable. Considering that they face a very wide range of problems of multiple user types, heterogeneous inputs, complex environments, and growing demands, it follows that they should have created many creative responses. The Community types are a close second in this kind of indicator. Practices related to integration and information management are frequent for this type. This may be a result of the needs of the community for a variety of information products, drawing on inputs or analyses from multiple sources. The community organizations tend to be concentrated in policy domains where the desire for integrated analyses for policy purposes are stronger. The only practice types that were reported by all types of repositories were interactive access and user support and friendliness. Since these repositories all share a common mission to provide access to information, concern for users would be expected. And given the growth of Web access and technology generally, this is not surprising. This may also be a result of budget pressures. Many of the interviews described interactive access efforts as ways to reduce costs or improve services without increasing expenditures.

Figure 1 - Notable Practices by Type of Repository

The practices related to confidentiality show an interesting pattern as well. The high bar for confidentiality in the mixed group is primarily from the NCES repository, which reported many practices of this sort. Confidentiality concerns for comprehensive and advocate organizations are indicated as well, which is consistent with their contents and organizational relationships. The lack of confidentiality concerns for communities and libraries also seems consistent with their content and mission. Most of the community organizations in this study do have confidentiality needs, but no particularly notable practices in that regard were reported.

These types of organizations were recognized in the analysis of the interview data, after data collection was complete. So it was not possible to explore the implications of this kind of consistency with the organization’s staff. With the information from these kinds of patterns now available, it would be potentially valuable to revisit these organizations, and others that fit the categories, to explore in more depth the origins and implications of these patterns.