Welcome to Hui Liu, new Graduate Research Assistant
In the Agricultural Communications Documentation Center. Hui brings excellent credentials to the Center. His experience includes computer work with the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), which administers a Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois. So he is familiar with gathering and processing information from varied sources, updating databases, maintaining web sites and providing information services to clients. His interest and experience in computer science and electronic information systems, processes and services have developed since 1995.
Please feel free to get in touch with Hui at liuhui@uiuc.edu when you have questions and are interested in help from the Documentation Center.
Recent conference papers are available online.
The Agricultural Communications Section of the Southern Association of Agricultural Scientists has posted nine papers from the recent annual meeting of SAAS. This event took place January 31-February 2 in Memphis, Tennessee. The papers involved topics such as research magazine readership, outsourcing graphic design services, streaming media for instructional delivery and developing effective program success stories for enhanced accountability.
You can review the papers at http://agnews.tamu.edu/saas/
Thanks to Professor Kris Boone
Kansas State University, for contributing seven documents recently to update our collection of scholarly material of which she is author or co-author. These refereed documents were published between 1995 and 1998.
We welcome materials that you have written
About agriculture-related communications. Here’s how you can check quickly to see which of your journal articles, reports and other documents already are in the collection:
On the search page of this web site, type your last name in the “Author” field. Press “Search.” The search will produce a list of documents under your name. We recommend searching only on your last name because of varied ways in which first names or initials often appear in citations.
New web site for communications managers.
The communications management special interest group of Agricultural Communicators in Education (ACE) recently added a web site to the ACE server. URL: http://www.aceweb.org/com_sig/ace_mgt.htm. It includes a list of good reading about management in organizations and communications units.
Agricultural publications in Canada.
The Canadian Farm Writers Federation is creating a comprehensive database of Canadian agricultural publications to be posted on the CFWF web site. Information is available from Owen Roberts at owen@ornet.or.uoguelph.ca
Keen interest in public reactions to biotechnology.
One of the fastest-growing parts of our collection these days involves the communications aspects of biotechnology, genetic engineering and related developments, globally. We are working hard to collect current literature about these topics. For example, you can now identify more than 100 of such documents by searching under subject terms such as “biotechnology” and “risk communication.” You can identify nearly 150 documents about food safety communications by searching under the subject term “food safety.”
Please let us know when you see gaps and can help strengthen the collection in this important area of interest. The human, interactive aspects of biotechnology are as important as the technological aspects.
Universities producing problems?
“The split between nature and culture as institutionalized in universities is producing a lot of problems,” according to an author in issue 39:1 (1999) of the Sociologic Ruralis journal. The comment by P. Kaltoft appeared in an article entitled, “Values about nature in organic farming practice and knowledge.”
Your thoughts?
Professional meetings approaching.
Here are the approaching meetings of several professional agricultural communicator organizations:
April 25-27
Washington Watch, sponsored by National Association of Farm Broadcasters, Washington, D.C.
Contact: Kelly Lenz at 785-272-3456.
May 3-4
“Communicating creatively,” D.C. Regional Workshop of Agricultural Communicators in Education, Washington, D.C.
Information: http://www.aceweb.org
May 14-16
West Regional Meeting, National Association of Farm Broadcasters, at Rochester, Minnesota.
Contact: Donna Schmidt at 507-477-2577.
June 12-16
Joint meeting of Agricultural Communicators in Education and National Extension Technology Conference (NETC) at Knoxville, Tennessee.
Information: http://web.utk.edu/~utia/ace-netc99
Would you like for us to help announce future meetings related to agricultural communications? We will be glad to do so.
Best regards and good searching.
Please let us know if we can help you find information and/or if you can suggest documents that we might add to this collection.