This outcome covers the issues surrounding A-Z information on council websites, information sharing between councils and links to Directgov. To fulfill the requirements of the outcome councils have to make A-Z information available on their websites as well as to call handling staff, and to categorise that information according to the Local Government Category List (LGCL) or the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV).

IPSV will replace the LGCL, the seamlessUK taxonomy and the Government Category List (GCL) for use across the public sector. From Summer 2005, the e-Government Metadata Standard (e-GMS) will recommend the IPSV as the mandatory encoding scheme for subject metadata in place of GCL.

Councils who have already invested in tagging their service descriptions to LGCL (or any other list such as seamlessUK) should continue to do so, but look to migrate to IPSV by December 2006 – noting that the esd-toolkit provides a mapping from LGCL to IPSV.

Councils who have not made significant strides in tagging their service descriptions should adopt IPSV.

Up until December 2006, A-Z information can be based on either LGCL or IPSV, but after that, it should be based on IPSV.

Guidance on the use of LGCL, IPSV and cross-references between the vocabularies is published at www.esd.org.uk/standards.

A number of other issues should be considered:

The Local Directgov Project is working with the national portal for Government services Directgov (www.direct.gov.uk/), to establish the infrastructure by which Local Government can contribute content. At this stage, a local authority would be advised to ensure that the means by which they hold their A-Z type information is readily extractable into an XML format, although this is not mandatory at present.

The Local Authority Websites (LAWS) project, in conjunction with the esd-toolkit has produced a mapping from the LGCL to the IPSV. This provides some comfort that this information can be provided over a National Infrastructure as well as in a purely Local Government domain.

The A-Z list of services must be “joined-up”- meaning it should have all council services listed in one place in two-tier areas. As a minimum it should include as many of the services on the LGCL as possible, although many councils will want to include services provided by partner agencies, such as the Citizen’s Advice Bureaux, as well as relevant services provided by neighbouring councils. Most councils will want to maintain the list and keep it up to date by use of a database with a number of nominated list editors, each being responsible for a group of service entries, although other approaches are acceptable. Some content managements systems support this – although councils should be careful to ensure that use of multiple category lists is supported if this is a facility they require.

Links themselves should, as a minimum, be “deep” links to pages giving detailed information on services.

Once the lists have been compiled they should be displayed on the council website and as a resource to staff handling telephone or personal callers. In making the lists available, councils should consider search mechanisms and different approaches to cross-referencing and indexing of the lists to make them easy to use.

In addition to the above, A -Z lists compiled by counties should include all the services provided by their districts. Approaches to syndicated content should be considered in this regard.