E-Stat Links

Question

The location of E-stat has changed and we're updating our links. Should we link to the "accept and enter" license page at
http://www.statcan.ca/english/Estat/licence.htm

Or is it acceptable to link right to E-Stat at
http://estat.statcan.ca/cgi-win/cnsmcgi.exe?LANG=E&ESTATFILE
=/ESTAT/DATA.HTM?

I would rather do the latter - they will be proxied links so off-campus users will have to enter their Malaspina student or employee IDs and PINs to access E-stat.

Answers

1. There are at least two factors to take into consideration regarding a local policy of jumping beyond the E-Stat licence page at
your institution. First, E-Stat is available to the public through participating DSP libraries. These libraries need to stipulate the
terms of the E-Stat licence for public usage and it seems most easily done through the E-Stat licence page. Users need to be informed of the licencing terms and while this could be done by providing your own licence page that then jumps beyond the E-Stat licencing page, I don't see any advantage to this approach.

Secondly, E-Stat is also available through DLI and many of us use our own pages to inform our campus users about the terms of the DLI licence. If your institution is a member of _both_ the DSP and DLI, you will want to decide if you should treat these two user communities (i.e., the public and your DLI constituents) differently in how you inform them about the terms of the E-Stat licence. All of our campus users are also part of the public; so you might decide to use the E-Stat licence page and treat both constituencies as one, namely, the public.

Alternatively, you may decide to provide separate access points for your public and campus users or your institution may not be participating in the DSP access to E-Stat. If you are providing access to E-Stat only under the DLI licence and you provide your own prior page describing the terms of the DLI licence, you might decide (for reasons as you indicated below) to jump beyond the E-Stat licence page.

The key is that our users be informed of the terms of the licence prior to using the actual product and, having been informed, their next steps in using the product implies that they agree to abide by these terms.

The DLI Executive group responsible for interpreting licence questions has not yet formally addressed your inquiry; so this statement simply expresses my opinion. But it is the line of argument that I'd take within this group.

2. We can get straight to E-Stat from the university through the proxy server. Transparent to the user.

From home, you need an id and password. Click and enter doesn't work.

3. Last year, there were three tabs on the main page: Overview, Articles and Data. This year, Overview and Articles were combined into a single tab whose file name is Art, and Over is gone. We also made Data the "landing" page; last year the landing page was Overview. One of the reasons for all of these changes is that, now that most publications are free, there is much less need to have E-STAT house its own version of many pages that were for fee last year.

Please link to the E-STAT launch page at:
http://www.statcan.ca/english/Estat/licence.htm.
Students should always enter via the licence page, accepting the agreement. From the E-STAT side-bar, users can access User Guides, CANSIM, census and Search map 2001.

4. The first time users should read the licence and click Accept and Enter. Then from the Table of contents, they can click on Search CANSIM, Search Census and Search map on the E-STAT side-bar.

Frequent users can Accept and Enter the terms of the licence or go directly to the E-STAT side bar.

We designed the page this way so that high school students would not be intimated be the entry process. We expect high school teachers to explain the licence when introducing E-STAT to their students.