Newsroom

CORVALLIS - The web site of the Government Information Sharing Project at Oregon State University has received an "Excellence Award" from Study Web, an Internet site that provides educational resources for students and teachers.

It can provide answers to such questions as the average earnings of a 40-year-old male Oregonian with a college degree ($42,636) to the number of Hispanic female residents in Frontier County, Kan., in 1990 (eight), and several hundred thousand other fa cts in between.

The company said the OSU site was one of the best educational resources on the web, and will soon feature it in their "business and finance, economics and statistics" section. Their site provides links to a wide variety of data and information of use t o teachers and students for research, study and reports.

Funded by the U.S. Dept. of Education and administered by OSU Libraries, the Government Information Sharing Project works to improve access to electronic government information, especially for remote users in Oregon and the general public.

It began in 1995, has received many other awards from the Internet industry and is now used internationally. Users include libraries, community developers, small and large businesses, researchers, students, journalists, agencies and others.

"This is an easy-to-understand interface that anyone can use to access government information," said Curt Pederson, associate provost for information services at OSU. "Another part of the project is to provide the hardware, software support and trainin g that can help small, rural schools and public libraries across Oregon access the Internet."

The site, educators say, helps empower both citizens and business people to not only access but also understand socioeconomic data about their own communities, while providing learning tools for K-12 educators and students. It is part of OSU's larger goal to provide both educational programs and resources to individuals across Oregon through the use of the latest technologies and such innovative programs as OSU Statewide, a broad extended educati on initiative.

The web site address is http://govinfo.kerr.orst.edu.