Within the national Cooperative Extension Service (CES) system, information exchange between individual states is encouraged. In practice however, state specialists seldom have convenient access to most materials available from other states (Andre, 1990; Hypes and Miller, 1993).

To promote the national exchange of health and safety program materials within CES and allied organizations, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) supported the development of the National Ag Safety Database (NASD). Although the early grant supporting this work specifically identified the CES as the primary target audience, other organizations concerned with agricultural safety and health also find the database useful.

In October 1993, NIOSH provided funding through its Agricultural Health Promotion System (AHPS) grant program to develop the first NASD. The database was developed at the University of Florida's Cooperative Extension Service, an organization that had successfully developed and deployed effective electronic information retrieval systems (Beck et al., 1994). Institutions participating in the AHPS grant were encouraged to contribute materials. Participation was solicited with non-AHPS institutions as well. In October 1994, the first prototype was delivered on CD-ROM to a select group of reviewers. In March 1995, a two-day evaluation and review workshop was held in Gainesville, Florida. After incorporating suggestions from reviewers, the general release of the NASD'95 CD-ROM occurred in June 1995.

In October 1996, NIOSH funded a three-year program to update the database and convert the database into HTML format for delivery on the World-Wide Web. Dr. Rick Niemeier of NIOSH directed the project and coordinated the identification, solicitation and procurement of new content. By October 1997, the entire database had been converted, a web-site established and a CD-ROM (NASD'97) produced (Dolan et al.., 1998). Expansion of the database continued through the end of the project (September 1999) and two more CD-ROMs were produced (NASD'98 and NASD'99).

In October 2001, NIOSH funded the current program to expand and maintain NASD. In 2002 USDA-CSREES ( (Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service) added funding support for this database.

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Andre, P. Q. J. 1990. In the Field of Agriculture, CD-ROM Delivers! CD-ROM EndUser. Helgerson Associates Inc. Falls Church, Va. 2(3):26-27.

Beck, H. B., P. H. Jones and D. G. Watson. 1994. A CD-ROM-based agricultural information retrieval system. Applied Engineering in Agriculture 10(1):127-132.

Dolan, M., R.W. Neimeier, P.H. Jones, J.S. Nelson 1998. The New National Ag Safety Database (NASD) on the Web & CD-ROMS. In the Proceedings of the National Institute for Farm Safety, pp. 1-4.

Hypes, T. M. and M. G. Miller. 1993. Worth it's weight in silver . . . the national CD-ROM sampler: An extension reference library. J. of Agric. and Food Info. 1(1):69-85

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