One goal of Extension is to provide practical information that makes a difference to producers. Cow Herd Appraisal Performance Software (CHAPS) has provided beef producers with production benchmarks for 30 years, creating a large historical data set. Many such large data sets contain useful information but are underutilized. Our goal was to create…

We provide an expanded environmental scan to assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) faced by education communities. Grounded in the literature, we identified 48 indicators and grouped them into 6 broad categories: (1) budget levels, (2) funding patterns, (3) community needs, (4) external economic conditions, (5)…

Since the late 1990s, few case studies on implementation of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) have appeared in the literature. How has or hasn't the landscape changed? This article reports on the experience of EAD planning and implementation at the University of Minnesota Libraries and suggests that though many of the lessons learned by early…

Offers information on the 1977 law passed by the Minnesota legislature which supported adoptive parents' right to open the sealed birth certificates of their adopted children. (CM)

An introduction discusses data collection methods, population served, materials collection, library use and public library finance. Tables for regional libraries include data for the total system as well as for subsystems. Figures are provided for number of administrative units, population served, staff, collections, open hours, circulation,…