Cornell's vast array of outreach programs help people in New York state and beyond with everything from teaching kindergarten and managing dairy cows to planning economic development.

The new Outreach Portal, just two clicks away from Cornell's home page, now makes it easier to find these programs and easier for program managers to publicize their services.

"Cornell is difficult enough for people inside it to find their way around," says Stephen Hamilton, associate provost for outreach. "People outside not only don't know where to look but may not have any idea that there's something to look for. We want to make our resources accessible."

The portal at http://www.cornell.edu/outreach/programs/ is not just a list, but a sort of Rosetta Stone to help people translate their thoughts. Along with "Whom do I ask?" outsiders might wonder, "What do I ask for?" Around Cornell, for example, "research" means the ongoing work of faculty members. To a third-grade teacher, it means "find out about ..." People interested in plants don't always type in "botany," but "plants" or "biology." Instead of "shrubs," they may enter "gardening" or "lawn care."

Names can be deceiving. The Cornell Nanobiotechnology Center conducts extensive outreach to help K-12 teachers with basic science. But if you were a teacher looking for ideas about teaching electricity and magnetism, would you be likely to click on "nanobiotechnology?"

Amanda Kittelberger, project manager in Cornell's outreach office, spent almost three years finding out how people search for what they want. She began with focus groups of teachers, labor leaders, human resources professionals, economic development workers and local government officials, using tools like "category agreement analysis": Give people a short list of topics and ask how they would categorize them. "When you get close to 70 percent using the same words, you know you've got a winner," Kittelberger says.

This was followed by a Web survey conducted by the Cornell Survey Research Institute, testing how people understood information about a selected group of 15 outreach programs, and usability testing by Cornell Information Technologies' (CIT) user-training and documentation specialists Michael Grace-Martin and Ellen Hartman, with the goal that users should be able to find what they need in about seven seconds.

An important discovery, Kittleberger says, was that "People don't want the nitty-gritty. They want to step into a big bucket that they feel reasonably sure is the right one and then poke around."

So the site, built by a CIT team led by technical program manager Dirk Swart, is based on a database that Kittelberger calls "shallow but very broad," providing basic information about programs with links to the programs' Web sites. Visitors can browse broad categories or search using keywords. The search box is deliberately located just above the list of categories. "If they're uncertain of what to search for they can get some ideas," Swart explains.

The information is entered and maintained by the people who manage the outreach programs, and organizers are eager for additions to the current list of about 140 programs.

Some Cornell people may not even think that what they do is outreach, Hamilton notes. What gets listed, however, must be a program accessible to the public, he says: "A program that has material available or staff that can be helpful."

Anyone with a Cornell NetID can submit a program by clicking on a link on the outreach page. Editors with expertise in various disciplines review submissions and help managers complete the online forms. Once a program is added to the site, the Outreach Office maintains a connection, periodically reminding managers to keep their information up-to-date. Program managers can access online reports that tell them how many people are reading their information, where they came from and what search terms were used.

"I think it's important for people [on campus] to understand that this is not a search engine," says Hamilton. "People who have outreach resources have to put information into it."

Kittelberger agrees, urging participation: "Users can only find programs that have been entered in the portal. Cornell outreach programs or providers who want to be found by the public from cornell.edu need to take the few minutes required to put in their information. The closer we get to 100 percent representation, the more valuable the portal will be."