Labels are one among several elements that supports users, when interacting with the state or municipality through a website (Rosenfeld, Morville & Arango, 2015). When websites are associated with low usability and weak or misleading labels, the user interaction is affected. Several studies have studied the usability of public websites at a certain point in time (e.g. Baker, 2007; Youngblood & Mackiewicz, 2012; Venkatesh, Hoehle & Aljafari, 2014). This presentation reports on the findings of a study that investigated the development in government websites' labels in the period 2010-2022. The specific purpose of the project was to study the online presence of Danish government and municipal institutions over time departing from four specific years (2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022) to see how the institutions have taken on the e-government paradigm (Taylor & Lips, 2008), and how labels and the communication have changed over time.

The empirical basis of the study is based on selective crawls of the Danish web performed by Netarkivet in Denmark (Nielsen, 2016). The government domain, including state administrations and ministries, government institutions, regions and municipalities, was included in the harvest, but this work focuses on labels from state administrations and ministries' websites. The data was handed out as WARC-files, which enables an analysis of specific HTML-tags on the websites, and specifically menu items such as labels. A similar approach is used in Luthfiyanto & Kusumo (2020) and Svarre (2021). This presentation will report on methodical reflections regarding isolating labels in WARC-files along with the results of the study.

References:

Baker, D.L. (2007). Website Usability of the Most Populous Counties in the United States. Journal of E-Government, 3(3), 65-89.

Luthfiyanto, A. &, Kusumo, D.S. (2020). Extraction of Website Navigation Label Using A Multiple Web Crawler: A Case Study on 14 University Websites in Indonesia. In: 2020 International Conference on Data Science and Its Applications (ICoDSA). IEEE, New York.

Nielsen, J. (2016). Using web archives in research: An introduction (s. 55). Netlab.

Rosenfeld, L., Morville, P. & Arango, J. (2015). Information architecture, For the Web and Beyond. O`Reilly: Sebastopol.

Svarre, T. (2021). Labelling on Academic Library Websites. In: Proceedings of the Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries. CEUR workshop proceedings.

Taylor, J. A., & Lips, A. M. B. (2008). The citizen in the information polity: Exposing the limits of

the e-government paradigm. Information Polity, 13(3–4), 139–152. https://doi.org/10.3233/IP-2008-0163.

Venkatesh, V., Hoehle, H. & Aljafari, R. (2014). A usability evaluation of the Obamacare website. Government Information Quarterly, 31(4), 669-680.

Youngblood, N.E. & Mackiewicz, J. (2012). A usability analysis of municipal government website home pages in Alabama. Government Information Quarterly, 29(4), 582-588.