Finally, a design document was prepared so that future webmasters will have a good blueprint of the program. Outreach and Expansion Information on international cotton researchers was gathered, mostly from the International Cotton Advisory Committee. International contributions to CotRes now include researchers in Australia, China, France, India, Peru, South Africa, United Kingdom. A total of 867 memos were sent to researchers in August 1999, most by email. As submissions were returned, researchers were immediately thanked by email and their information was added to the database, which was then uploaded to the web site, overwriting the previous version.
Responses continue to come in and are added to the database as they are received.
Copies of the outreach memos are provided in Appendix 1. Results CotRes is the result of efforts to gather original data from researchers, format it uniformly, and make it accessible, easily usable, and searchable. It started as an electronic bulletin board system and quickly advanced to a web site, and its technology and usability has continued to improve. Researchers themselves control the information about their work that appears in CotRes. The current challenge is not so much technological as it is behavioral.