Newsletter 30/6/2009
Evaluation questionnaire – results
Thank you for taking the time to answer our survey!
The majority of users who sent their answers work in local or national governments and in education (students, professors, teachers, researchers…). Other important user groups are citizens, manufacturers, retailers and service providers.
Half of the users work with EUR-Lex ‘every day’ or ‘several times a week’. Most of these users are working in the EU institutions (62% use EUR-Lex ‘every day’) and/or are translators (48% use EUR-Lex ‘every day’).
Users come to EUR-Lex mainly to:
- consult the Official Journal (78% consult it ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’),
- consult the Directory of Community legislation in force (73%),
- consult case-law (61%),
- find a specific document (54%)
Treaties, international agreements and preparatory acts are also consulted ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ by half of our users. 35% of the participants in the survey come to EUR-Lex to consult our thematic files.
The search features used often are:
- search by search term (75% of you use it ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’)
- search by natural number – the number of the document (72%)
- search by Official Journal publication reference (52%)
- search by date (51%)
- search by file category (49%)
Others are used less frequently:
- search in consolidated legislation (43%)
- search by classification headings (32 %)
The advanced search is used by 25% of the participants.
Bibliographic notices are consulted intermittently and 21% of the participants don’t read them.
The most useful format for the participants of the survey is PDF (82%), followed by HTML (38%) and DOC (31%).
67% of participants find bilingual display useful.
EUR-Lex is mostly displayed with Windows Internet Explorer (80%) and Mozilla Firefox (38%).
We have also received many suggestions, for example:
- the simplification of search and navigation by adding a search box to the homepage,
- faster and more visible consolidation,
- thematic search.