Summer, 1996 (v8n3)

UC Sustainable Agriculture Program Wins Bronze for Web Site

UC SAREP has won a bronze Circle of Excellence Award for its Internet World Wide Web site from the national Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). The award honors the statewide program for accurately targeting its audience and communicating its mission via the Web site. "The World Wide Web is a great way to disseminate the scientific research we fund on sustainable ag practices and public policies to California farmers, researchers, consumers, policy makers, UC administrators, and government officials," says Bill Liebhardt, SAREP director. SAREP's staff of 10 contribute information to the site (http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu) which is managed by Tom Bates, SAREP programmer/analyst. The site allows users to search for and view information on a cover crops database with 400 color images of plants, summaries of dozens of SAREP-funded research projects, hundreds of newsletter articles and calendar entries. "In these days of dwindling monetary resources, putting this information on the Web is an excellent and cost effective way to leverage work that is already being done," says Jill Shore Auburn, SAREP associate director.

This is what the CASE judges had to say about the SAREP Web site:

Be prepared when you visit this site for a very different kind of Web experience. No cool graphics; no Javascript; no animations; no Quicktime or RealAudio. But that's precisely what the judges liked about this site: it didn't impose massive, unneeded media on its users (who were most likely connecting over very low-speed connections). Instead, it offered its audience a massive amount of information that they needed and made the information easy to find. The site has an excellent search engine and is very easy to use.

Other Sites
US Department of Energy's (DOE) Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development

http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/

The DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Denver Regional Support Office is operating the Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development. To help communities design and implement sustainable development (good for the local economy, environment and quality of life), this new service will assist communities throughout the United States by providing world-class consultation and information. Federal, state, and local agencies that assist community developers are also target customers.

The Center for Sustainable Agricultural Systems

http://ianrwww.unl.edu/ianr/csas

The Center for Sustainable Agricultural Systems was formed in 1991 within the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for the purpose of bringing together people and resources to promote an agriculture that is efficient, profitable, and environmentally and socially sustainable. The Center uses a systems approach to address the complex and multidimensional challenges associated with a sustainable and profitable agriculture. This site has links to information about various aspects of the program including publications and reports, current activities, a calendar, and other sustainable-agriculture-related sites, including UC SAREP and SAN (http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/san), the communications and outreach arm of the USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program.