The importance of open government data is often associated with increased public trust, civic engagement, and accountable administrations. While there is a myriad of benefits, the existing literature suggests that many open government datasets lack accessibility and usability for diverse users. This study seeks to explore what contextual information users require when they access these datasets. Using mixed methods, we aim to discover the challenges of accessing data, and the necessary contextual information needed by the users to overcome these challenges. As the outcome of this study, we propose a framework called "Data Guides", which is composed of the identified important contextual information. In future work, we will test the effectiveness of the Data Guide in aiding users' accessing and understanding open government data.

Open government data (OGD) is a valuable resource for both policy transparency and government accountability. All levels of the United States government are working hard to promote open data and its portals. However, there is still a lack of studies on local‐level OGD portals in the United States, particularly on the quality of metadata adopted by these portals. By examining 200 US cities, a list of 112 local‐level portals is sampled and we investigate the current usages of open data platforms for building local‐level OGD portals. This study further investigates and discusses the adoption and potential issues of metadata on those OGD portals. Our result findings discuss the platform distributions among US local‐level OGD portals, and also highlight several critical issues associated with metadata on the portals. We anticipate the results will inspire further studies on identifying solutions to improve the metadata and enhance the usability of open government data portals.

The rapid development of Open Government Data (OGD) and the increasing attention on data use/reuse have stimulated many studies on data‐related issues. However, the findability of OGD is still one of the major challenges. Aiming to ameliorate the situation that “data is hard to find”, this paper examines OGD users' needs and accessing behaviors when interacting with local OGD portals. Transaction log analysis and web content mining were used in order to obtain insights from large groups of OGD users in an unobtrusive manner. Through analyzing transaction log data from three local OGD portals, including Open Data Philly (http://opendataphilly.org), Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center (http://wprdc.org) and Analyze Boston (http://data.boston.gov), our study shows that users relied on different channels to enter local OGD portals, and such channels have different impacts on user success in finding the sought‐after data. We also find that OGD users prefer browsing over searching when inside the portals, the utilization of different browsing entries, and users' data needs.

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