A new online tool is making it possible for livestock producers and others to find research information that has been presented at Kansas State University´s Cattlemen´s Day and Swine Day going back decades.
"The Department of Animal Sciences and Industry has undertaken a project to deposit research papers from the entire series of Cattlemen´s Day and Swine Day conferences in the K-State Research Exchange (K-REx)," said Marty Courtois, repository manager at Hale Library on K-State´s campus.
"K-REx is built on a set of standards which facilitates the exchange of information with other repositories around the world. Google and other search engines make a point of indexing all institutional repositories worldwide, and items from institutional repositories rank highly in Google searches.
If a producer is interested in research information on dried distiller´s grains, for example, he or she can enter that phrase in the search box on the Animal Sciences and Industry community page in K-REx and retrieve more than 300 papers. Users also can search by author, title or published date.
Research papers have been added dating back to 1968 from K-State´s Swine Day, and Cattlemen´s Day proceedings to 1995. Eventually, all Cattlemen´s Day papers back to 1968 will be available.
More information about K-REx is available at the website: krex.k-state.edu/dspace/2097/1720 or by contacting Courtois at 785-532-4428 or krex@ksu.edu.