About Virtual Oregon




  Virtual Oregon was a data coordination initiative, established in May 2000 at Oregon State University with seed funding from the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium, to:
  • archive and distribute environmental and other place-based data on Oregon and associated areas via an innovative web interface;
  • identify key data sets that are not yet available to users; and
  • facilitate development of statewide standards for archiving, documenting, and disseminating data.
Rather than gathering key representatives and co-locating them in a physical center, Virtual Oregon sought to devise a distributed architecture occupying multiple locations on the OSU campus. The availability of an excellent campus network infrastructure makes it possible to present users with the representation of a single, centralized facility. This approach was selected in order to maximize contact with students, faculty, and staff on campus, as well as to provide a much broader range of hours to service interactions with extension agents and other members of OSU's statewide community.

Mission Statement

The mission of Virtual Oregon was to:

  • provide an efficient service for locating and accessing Oregon environmental and other place-based data.
  • make these data fully accessible to educators, researchers, policy making and regulatory agencies, industry, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and individual citizens.
  • facilitate more effective environmental research by developing and managing a comprehensive, accurate and accessible scientific information base.
  • provide exciting and marketable training opportunities for OSU students.
  • provide a foundation for moving extension and outreach activities beyond their current dependence on paper publications, making it possible for OSU to assume a pioneering role as "the 21st century land grant institution."
  • provide the data management infrastructure for OSU's new Institute for Natural Resources
Download informational flyer: Part 1 (120K Power Point file) | Part 2 (60K MS Word document)
Download Powerpoint overview (4.5 Mb)
Draft Strategic Plan
Draft Data Access Policy

Natural Resource Digital Library Exploration Project (by Janine Salwasser)

User Interview Questions and Responses (48 K pdf file)
Workshop Summary, 7/18/01 (40 K pdf file)

Demonstration Proposal for Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2002

JCDL Poster (797K Power Point file)

Virtual Oregon Proof-of-Concept (Summer 2002, by Dylan Keon, now disabled)

American Geophysical Union Poster abstract (December 2002)

Final Report to NWACC (404 K pdf file, January 2003)



Last update: July 31, 2004