Subject: Re: Washington State Library receives grant to distribute Find-It! Washington to three states
Ray, Joyce (jray@imls.fed.us)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 10:22:23 -0500
Message-Id: <39513C7C5559D111AC7200600896B468CECA3E@MAIL> From: "Ray, Joyce" <jray@imls.fed.us> To: "'gils@cni.org'" <gils@cni.org> Subject: Re: Washington State Library receives grant to distribute Find-It! Washington to three states Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 10:22:23 -0500
On Tue, Oct 13, 1998, Gayle Palmer <gpalmer@statelib.wa.gov> wrote:
>
> Washington State Library Leads Other States toward a Digital Future
>
> The states of Oregon, Mississippi and New Hampshire will soon benefit
> from the success of Find-It! WashingtonTM (http://find-it.wa.gov/) the
> unique website created by the Washington State Library. The State
> Library has just been awarded $114,040 by the Institute of Museum and
> Library Services to replicate this popular program in these three
> states. The Institute is a federal agency that fosters innovation,
> leadership and a lifetime of learning, and sponsors the National
> Leadership Grant program. Nancy Zussy, State Librarian, noted that the
> State Library proposal was one of only ten national awards made by the
> Institute, and it was selected from sixty-six applications for Library
> Research and Demonstration Project funding.
>
> Washington State's Government Information Locator Services (WAGILS)
> launched the Find-It! Washington search engine in June 1998 in order
> to increase the ability of citizens to find and use state and local
> government information and services. Since its June debut, Find-It!
> Washington has clearly demonstrated its popularity, with website use
> growing by more than 12,000 hits a week.
>
> It has already received national and international notice. Project
> Director Phillip Coombs was invited to present a paper at the
> international Internet Society's annual conference in Geneva
> Switzerland in July concerning the metatagging process used by
> Find-it! Washington. His report can be read at
> (http://www.isoc.org/inet98/proceedings/1c/1c_1.htm). The Ohio
> Supercomputer Center, Electronic Commerce, Law and Information Policy
> Strategies program at Ohio State University recently used Washington
> State's program as a case study of successful implementation of
> intergovernmental connectivity. The Center's report Eliminating Legal
> and Policy Barriers to Interoperable Government Systems was issued in
> August 1998 and can be read at
> (http://iep.fedworld.gov/library/elapbigs/cover.html).
>
> Users of Find-It! Washington can search more than 190,000 resource
> descriptions linked from seventy-six local and state government servers
> in Washington. As the only Washington search engine that provides
> access to both local and state government information, it offers
> citizens easy and powerful access to online information of cities,
> counties and state government and to more than 82,000 printed government
> publications located in Washington libraries. If the user doesn't find
> the information needed, they can use the unique "GILShelp" e-mail, which
> connects them with live librarians to assist in their search for
> information.
>
> The State Library WAGILS staff assist state and local governments to
> become participants in the program, as well as offer workshops,
> consultation and training to develop content for world wide web
> delivery. The indexing and categorizing concepts of WAGILS can be
> used in an Internet or Intranet environment.
>
> For more information please contact Gayle Palmer, WAGILS Program
> Manager, 360-704-5210, e-mail: gpalmer@statelib.wa.gov.
Peggy:
Thanks for sending this. I'm glad to know what listserves are carrying
these announcements. Actually, there's a mistake in the announcement in
that there were 10 national awards in the Research and Demonstration
category, not 10 awards total.
How are things?
Joyce Ray
<jray@imls.fed.us>
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