From left to right, Sandy Miller Hays, Jim De Quattro, Jody Shuart, Pete Lombardo, Flor Schroder and Rob Herring. Download 300-dpi image in .zip format.

ARS Information Team Wins Award for Spanish Website

By Don Comis
February 7, 2006

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7—A team of Agricultural Research Service employees has won an ARS award for expanding the information available in Spanish on the agency's website.

The ARS Spanish Website Development Team won the 2005 ARS Excellence in Information Award for translating additional material into Spanish and for creating specialized links in Spanish for the site. The team of designers, translators and web specialists is being honored today at an agency award ceremony at U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters here.

"This group of employees has shown a great deal of teamwork, effort and innovation to bring this Spanish website to fruition," said ARS Administrator Edward B. Knipling. "Their work has made information about ARS research and programs available to millions of people in the United States and around the world."

The award is given to employees who make outstanding contributions to the agency's ability to coordinate and deliver information services and technologies that support agricultural research and education.

Members of the team are ARS Information Staff (IS) Director Sandy Miller Hays, IS webmaster Jim De Quattro, IS secretary Flor Schroder, IS designer Jody Shuart, ARS Web Branch Chief Pete Lombardo, and Internet specialist Rob Herring.

The website offers users information in Spanish about ARS research news, employment opportunities, national programs and other subjects. In addition to accessing the translated pages, visitors can link to databases and other features of the English-language site using navigation buttons. The team expanded and refined software developed by Lombardo to manage the web pages.

ARS is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific research agency.