1. The executive branch comprises all the agencies that carry out the laws passed by the legislative
branch. How does that appear to be different from agencies or organizations associated with the
Office of the President? Is there a way you can think of to characterize these offices as a group?
How do the various websites to which we link for this week differ in their presentation of the
various presidential agencies? Which one do you think you would refer users to?
The three websites differ in their presentation of the various presidential agencies in terms of
priority. The GPO Access page is a location more for the collection of presidential documents, not
necessarily agency information unless an agency is specifically involved in one of the documents.
Users would have to spend more time poking around GPO Access if they were interested in finding
out more about the various agencies. Whitehouse.gov is like the one stop shop for presidential
information. The information is there but if you interested in one particular agency, you may have to
explore a little bit to find information on it. The LSU site on the other hand puts the information
front and center, providing a list of presidential agencies and links to more information about them.
If I could only refer patrons to one site it would be the LSU Federal Agency Directory. I tend to like
what I refer to as “link farms”. While the LSU site does direct users back to the Whitehouse.gov site
quite a bit, I still think if a patron came in wanting information on a particular agency, it would be
much easier to point the patron to the LSU site and let them find it on the provided list – Of course
the drawback being that they would have to have some knowledge of what department the agency
falls under. If the patron was more interested in browsing agency or government information, I
might send them exploring at Whitehouse.gov just because the site design is friendly and caters to
browsing for information. I would only send a patron to GPO Access if they were already fairly
familiar with the site, or had some idea of what document they wanted.