Quick! Who's doing research on the European corn borer in Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS)? Who's working on rural development? How is CALS fulfilling its land-grant mission? For those of you thinking "there really should be a Web site with that kind of information," you're in luck.

The new CALS Research Portal at http://www.cals.cornell.edu/research brings together the varied research activities of the college, as well as the people, facilities and events involved. The site, launched Oct. 15, covers the activities of CALS, the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station in Ithaca and the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva. It was built in collaboration with Mann Library, which now maintains it.

"In addition to learning more about any individual faculty member's research," says Susan Riha, director for sponsored research at CALS, "this new research portal will for the first time convey the breadth and depth of CALS research, from long-term international development programs to the most cutting-edge basic science, from the laboratory bench to applications already affecting the lives of New York citizens and people around the world today."

The portal is structured around the four academic priority areas of the college -- Land-Grant Mission, Applied Social Sciences, Environmental Sciences and New Life Sciences -- and can be searched and browsed to find people, events and seminars, research grants and funding opportunities. Initiated as part of the comprehensive redesign of the CALS Web site, the new research portal and the technology behind it grew out of the work done on Cornell's virtual life sciences library, known as VIVO.

Sustaining the new portal resource is a big challenge. New content is constantly being added, with priority given to suggestions and interests expressed by CALS faculty, departments and students. Such suggestions can be sent to the portal team via a "Contact Us" link on the page.

In addition to soliciting content from individuals and departments, Mann Library has established automatic feeds of information from a variety of sources. The library is working with CALS administration and the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) to bring data from faculty annual reporting and from the OSP Data Warehouse directly into the research portal.

Recent article citations by CALS authors are downloaded from the Biosis and PubMed databases, many with links to the full text. And plans are under way to link directly to the Cornell News Service, CUInfo and other campus data sources.

The research portal marks a new stage in the collaboration between Mann Library and CALS. "The portal represents an avenue of considerable utility for persons internal as well as external to the college," said Bill Fry, senior associate dean of CALS. "It helps to attain a holistic view of research in the college."