Information on region is just a click away

Several Web sites offer information about our neck of the woods, but the Western New York Regional Information Network at http://rin.buffalo.edu/ is especially laudable for being so well organized and comprehensive. The RIN, as it's called, is a service of UB's Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth http://regional-institute.buffalo.edu/, with links to myriad public service and governance Web pages. The homepage has a clickable map of Western New York's eight counties, plus four pull-down menus labeled "Western New York," "Choose a Public Service," "Choose a Jurisdiction" and "Choose a RIN Service."

The first menu covers categories of information spanning Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie, Genesee, Niagara, Orleans and Wyoming counties, and leads to lists of reports, maps and state and federal databases containing useful statistical and demographic data. The "Job Opportunities" page, for example, has online employment listings for the entire region.

The public services pull-down menu offers information on a wide range of topics, including economic development, infrastructure, environment and housing. Under "Life & Community," you can find a listing of more than 50 museums or search for national, state, county and municipal parks by clicking on a map of the eight counties.

The third menu allows you to click on the name of a specific city, town, village or reservation and bring up a page linking to specific directories and lists of municipal, economic, education, health and human services.

The fourth menu announces services such as Internet/HTML workshops available from RIN and links to Web sites promoting governmental innovation.

For a broader perspective, check out Lockwood Memorial Library's "Other Governments and Inter-Government Organizations" Web page http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/lml/Government_Doc/othergov.html, which was created by the Business and Government Documents Reference Center. There's a link to the RIN and selected local sites, of course, but additional sites enlarge the scope of coverage to worldwide. "Other Cities/Counties" includes the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development's compilation of community plans http://www.hud.gov/states.html and "State Governments" references the Library of Congress' Internet resource page http://www.loc.gov/global/state/stategov.html of meta-indexes for state and local government information.

For a global perspective, you can browse two further categories: "Other National Governments" and "Inter-Government Organizations."

Whatever your definition of "regional," there's bound to be a Web site that encompasses it.

-Will Hepfer and Nancy Schiller, University Libraries