Through distributed maintenance, the Project Team hopes to maximize the timeliness and accuracy of the information while minimizing the cost of a centralized research staff. With 120 different categories of information for each state, a centralized research staff would have to be enormous just to keep up with state activities, let alone ensure the timeliness and accuracy of the information. To this end, the Project Team has designed and is currently using a secure, user-friendly interface for use by state and local contributors. For our contributors, this interface will simply appear as a set of forms, where information can be quickly and easily entered and automatically posted to the appropriate portion of the database. We expect that the use of this interface will dramatically increase both the content and the usefulness of the Project clearinghouse.
Users can look at information organized by category for a specific state.
Information by Category . Information by Keyword . Users can use a search engine to locate information located anywhere in the Project database by keyword. The Project is tracking a broad range of information related to telecommunications. Currently, the States Inventory Project is beta testing the update and retrieval interfaces with the assistance of selected state and local policy makers, academics, educators, and information technology professionals across the country.