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Copyright © 1999-2000 Her Majesty the Queen in the Right of Alberta. All rights reserved.
The existing Barley Manual was identified as the core resource for preparing content to publish on the Internet. To fill in the gaps and flesh out information in the Manual, a group of information seekers and providers (See Note) identified timely resources to help participating barley producers make appropriate management decisions and provide technical information.
The existing Barley Manual was published in 1986. Most of the agronomic information was still valid, but changes have occurred. The document was scanned through an OCR (optical scanner) to create an electronic file that could be updated. Appropriate changes were made to bring the document up-to-date. The document was divided into approximately 40 pages for publishing as an Internet document and the appropriate links were created between the files. This process went well and was useful for identifying other information needed for the project. This part of the project took approximately six person days to break the text into section and identify the jumps within the text before turning the material over to a commercial HTML coder.
Several graphic images in the manual were converted into gif images, which were linked to the appropriate text files. It took time to find a contractor to convert line art into the gifs. They were expensive to do at ~ $100/each.
The barley information providers identified priority subject areas in which to find material for placing on the Internet during the pilot project beyond that covered in the Barley Manual. Other departmental publications were reviewed and articles were taken from newsletters such as Soilutions published by the Plant Industry Division. The information that the seekers and providers believed should be published if available included:
Market Information
Producers want market information that will help them make better marketing decisions. The Market Analysis and Statistics Branch coded complete editions of the monthly market outlook. They also prepare the weekly market commentary and a biweekly crop report. The department is also posting weekly cash prices for grain on the Internet using data published by Alberta Grain Commission. Links have been made to the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange, Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade, which provide daily closes for grain and livestock futures. Other Agriculture Sites also points to a number financial products that can help barley producers make management decisions.
Weather
The presentation of daily weather information is a pointer to the Environment Canada web pages. In addition our pages provide some interpretation of the numbers posted by Environment Canada.
The department is posting monthly weather summaries prepared by the Conservation and Development Branch. Additional department information was posted on weather terminology important to farmers.
One avenue that the department did not pursue was posting our weekly weather summaries because of unresolved issues related to Environment Canada's copyright of weather products developed using their raw data.
Call of the Land
At present a description of what the program is, partial scripts and where to pick it up are posted. It would be possible and relatively easy to post full daily transcripts of the program. An automated HTML coder could be added with Windows and WP6.1, which would make the task reasonable given it would be performed daily.
Agri-News
Agri-News is going on the web easily. Communications Division is using HTML tagging software that works in WP6.1 to tag each issue. The current issues and six months of archived issues are available at all times.
Coming Events
The quarterly list of events published in Agri-News has been posted. It is updated when new events are sent to Communications Division and old events are deleted weekly. An electronic form asking for information on coming events that would be of interest to Alberta farmers has been posted. Users can an e-mail information about coming events to the Department.
Crop Protection
The basics are up and available. More weed descriptions and pesticide descriptions could be added. The pesticide recommendations will need to be revised later this fall. This will be a considerable amount of work. There would be valuable to have a search engine in this subject area.
Permission has been received to allow the posting of several insect photos produced by Agriculture Canada. Barley Project did not come to grips with the best way to handle these images.
International Marketing
Marketing Services contracted InfoHarvest to prepare material. The contractorprepared several pages of information, which is located on a server at CCInet. They were linked to the home page just before the end of the pilot project.
Department Staff
This is a page that never really progressed. Some staff developed personal pages there was no effective way to connect their pages to anything on the Department's web pages. There is a real potential to use clickable maps here to provide our clientele with good information access about departmental services.
Irrigation
Basic information on irrigating barley was posted. With the rains in the South this year, there is really no need to put up anything else regarding timing, rates, etc. Links were created to a virtual library on irrigation. These resources will be evaluated for their appropriateness to Alberta, then more specific links will be made to documents at that site.
Engineering
Several articles have been prepared. They need editing before being posted on the Internet. There wasn't been time to do the editing before the end of the pilot. A fact sheet for calculating combine losses is nearly ready for posting.
Production Economics
The data prepared in this subject area is challenging to convert into HTML, because it is heavily oriented to tables.
Publications
This section is complete. The online order form is working. Approximately 15 orders have come in from both project participants and non-participants. When the What's New in Publication flyer is posted use of this ordering system should rise.
Internet versions of new fact sheets are being added as they are prepared for paper distribution in the Publishing Branch.
What's New
New material posted on our site is promoted on this page. Some ministerial press releases were posted here, however as of September 1, the Public Affairs Bureau (PAB) puts all government press releases on their web pages. We have linked to their pages.
Barley_l Mail Server
The e-mail service received several excellent questions. As most Department staff are not subscribed to the barley_l mail server, the challenge was to find department staff to provide good answers. Staff have co-operated enthusiastically to answer these questions. The mail server needs to be nurtured until it reaches a critical mass and is self-sustaining. Some of our professional staff are "e-mail challenged".
Recipes of the Month
Some barley recipes from a booklet were posted at the start of the project. The way new postings will be addressed and posted needs to be addressed. It needs to be kept interesting.
The next easiest material to prepare for the project was the life cycle and management information for weeds, insects and diseases that was extracted from the Practical Crop Protection book. This was because the information was in a clean electronic format with few tables.
At the other end of the scale were the back issues of Soilutions. Each issue contained several articles done in several different formats and the were not stored as files on one computer. After identifying the problem, the full text of the July issue of Soilutions was supplied as a single file, addressing most of the problems encountered with back issues. The alternative would have been to scan the printed issue, which would have been difficult due to the layout of the publication.
Most other publications fell somewhere in between this range. One area that presents difficulties is the publication of tables. The specialists want to use them, but the only supported way to present them is as preformated courier text, which is unappealing. The table package that is supported by Netscape is much more attractive but it hasn't been formally adopted by the web community.
From an information management perspective, it would be easiest to expand our site be including other cereal crops. We can build on information that is already posted at our site about pests and crop protection.
The following italicized comments are from the Price Waterhouse Evaluation Report for the project:
Content Seeker Providers were generally very supportive of the project. They were extremely pleased about their ability as a team to work together and "pull it off". Some described what they had managed to accomplish under project barley as "amazing". The participants were proud to have been on the project and enthusiastic about the next steps. This group, however, expressed the greatest amount of frustration with respect to technology support and training.
It is clear that producers' desire is for current or "new" data. They felt that it was worthwhile having the basic data there to access but where they really believe the value added will come in the ability to access brand new information, unpublished information, research results, magazine articles, market information etc.
In many ways they (producers) see the system as a replacement for direct contact with specialists or researchers to get this "new" information.
Producers see discussion groups and e-mail as very valuable tools. Many were frustrated that the barley discussion group didn't really get going and were particularly frustrated that specialists were not using it to communicate. The discussions groups are seen as a real value adding component for producers - they want this kind of interaction and ideas exchange.
The following suggestions were provided from producers and kiosk providers with respect to information to add:
The user of this information agrees to the terms and conditions in the terms of use and
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Copyright © 1999-2000 Her Majesty the Queen in the Right of Alberta. All rights reserved.