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Oxford Rural Gateway
George Stock
February 25, 2001
Oxford County farmers and their families now have a local based page of direct links to relevant web sites. The Oxford Rural Gateway has links to local and private in addition to federal and provincial government agriculture pages.
The Oxford Rural Gateway is at http://www.ocl.net/servicecanada/rural_gateway/. For a short time it can also be accessed through a direct link on the "What's New?" feature on the Home Page of Oxford County Library, http://www.ocl.net.
The Rural Gateway page was developed at Oxford County Library as part of Service Canada, a program that improves access to information on federal government programs and services. The objective was to make it easy to directly access a number of pages relevant to farmers in the Canada site, the federal government's massive home page, http://www.canada.gc.ca.
Among the links into the Canada site included in the Rural Gateway are those to agricultural programs and services, publications, regulations, weather, market reports, health information, farm taxation, business information, Canada Pension Plan, environmental impact, biotechnology, agricultural careers, research, trade policy and farm management information.
Links were added to the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs site and to private enterprise web sites such as Farms.com and the Ontario Farmer, in order to make the Rural Gateway more comprehensive.
A connection is available to Agriweb, a search engine that searches only agricultural web sites. This is a tremendous advantage in that agriculture searches using generic search engines often result in vast quantities of irrelevant results.
The Rural Gateway is rounded out with a page of links to local agricultural organizations and search engines to connect to rural organizations at the provincial and national levels. Local farm related organizations with web pages are invited to contact Oxford County Library to have a link established to their page.
Farmers, give the Oxford Rural Gateway a try and add it to your bookmarks for future reference.
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