In the 1985 Animal Welfare Act (AWA) amendments, it is interesting to note that there is a mandate for the research community to use emerging, increasingly powerful electronic databases. Possibly this is one of the first times that Congress realized the power of computer databases and purposely ordered their use. Since the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulates the AWA, the National Agricultural Library (NAL) was the logical place for Congress to require the development of an animal welfare information program that would be accessible to the regulated community. This congressional information mandate changed NAL in many ways as the Animal Welfare Information Center took shape and substance. Changes occurred in collection and indexing policies, innovations in information delivery were tried for the first time, and there was recognition of NAL by a new group of users. We have also affected the regulated community, in a positive way I hope, and, needless to say, the regulated community has molded us. We are here to serve you.
Personally, I think we have succeeded in meeting our mandate with a program of activities, services and information products that has been more effective and influential than most people expected. No one has ever been turned away because s/he could not afford to pay for such services or information. At such times, I feel that we have succeeded in giving the taxpaying public the services that Congress expected. I feel privileged to have been allowed the responsibility to develop a program from concept to functional reality; from an non-existent program into an internationally known resource and model.
Needless to say, the process of program development has not
always gone as smoothly as hoped, nor have we done everything
that we felt was important to do. We didn't have any NAL programs
to model as NAL is not a repository of biomedical information as
is the National Library of Medicine. We had to decide what to
add to the NAL collection and the AGRICOLA database; some people
felt that we were superfluous and really not needed by the
potential users. In the face of these challenges, we found a
niche that is unique. The program has been productive and stayed
focused on those topics that Congress wanted addressed and, in
the process, gained a credible reputation. However, there is
still much to be done. We would like to continue to meet these
challenges for 10 more years. I feel that as long as there is a
regulated community, there will be a need for the AWIC program
and services.
The rest of this presentation will provide a brief summary of the evolution of the AWIC program, the major accomplishments of the first decade of the program, and what the future may hold.
Many of you have read the text of the 1985 AWA amendments that established the Center. You are aware that we are to provide information to support those people and institutions regulated under the AWA. But, I will briefly review the congressional mandate: The Center is to provide services and information to address employee training for the proper handling of animals, methods to alleviate pain and distress, and alternatives based on the 3Rs of Russell and Burch. We have seldom deviated from this mandate, although you will see publications related to farm animal welfare that we have produced as part of the NAL mission to serve agriculture. The first activities started in 1986.
In August 1986, Joseph Howard, Director, NAL, and others attended a meeting with Christine Stevens, Director, Animal Welfare Institute, to discuss the formation of an information service at NAL. Stevens was very interested in how the information service was progressing at NAL since she was so instrumental in the passage of the 1985 amendments. Other activities included purchasing books and journals and exhibiting for the first time at the annual meeting of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
Initial program funding of $750,000 for 1 year had passed the House and was due to go to the Senate. It was eventually passed and was passed through APHIS to NAL. It was only 1 year, mind you. NAL administrators had no idea that there would be funding for anything other than that year!
However, to the surprise of everyone, Congress appropriated $750,000 again for the program in the fiscal year 1987 budget. Funding uncertainties continued to make planning an ongoing program difficult, but it was beginning to be clear that this was going to become a permanent program at NAL . In February 1987, I was asked to be the acting coordinator of the Center. I had started the Biotechnology Information Center earlier that year and since I was the only person on the NAL staff that had worked with animals in research, I was asked to also take on the position as head of the AWIC program. It didn't look like too much work, so I agreed.
This year (1987) the first additional staff were hired. It was also the year when the AWIC grants program was started. I still consider the grants program one of the ways that we contributed significantly to the generation of useful information products for those using animals in biomedical research. Through the years, many outstanding projects were completed. Overall, I think we got a lot of bang for the buck. I am sorry that we no longer have these funds.
In 1988, staff began to produce subject-oriented bibliographies and grapple with how to do an "alternatives search." It is interesting to note that this was the first year that we started to disseminate information electronically. AWIC funds were used to develop a bulletin board system at NAL. The system was named the Agricultural Library Forum. This sounds lofty until you use the acronym -- ALF. I seldom used that acronym in public as you can imagine!! Over the years many AWIC publications have been made available on that system. Time marches on even for bulletin boards, and the system has been replaced with a World Wide Web home page.
Although the Center was becoming recognized as a source of information on the care and use of animals in commercial enterprises (our requests had topped the 1,000 mark), the program was suffering from the disruptions caused by uncertain year-to-year funding. This dilemma was recognized by Stevens, and I believe it was mostly through her efforts that the funding was transferred to NAL for FY 1989. The certainty of funding allowed the program to really begin to grow and blossom.
There were a lot of "firsts" in 1989. The first information product funded by AWIC was a comprehensive bibliography -- Laboratory Animal Welfare -- compiled by the Scientists Center for Animal Welfare. It was the first of several SCAW publications that we supported.
Another major event that involved the staff was the production of a videotape about the products and services of AWIC -- "Resources Today for the Research of Tomorrow." We all got to be stars in that one. We shared our stardom with people from other facilities -- Kathy Nepote of the University of Maryland, Stephen Shiffer of Georgetown University Medical School, and Peggy O'Neill of the National Institutes of Health. If you have looked at the tape, you may say that you didn't see O'Neill. You are right, the primates were so obnoxious and so noisy during the taping, that there was no good footage to put into the final film! Most of the 1,500 or more copies are still being used as a training video around the country.
For the first time, AWIC program and usage statistics were included in the annual report that APHIS produces for Congress on animal welfare activities. In 3 years, the user statistics had increased from 0 to 1,523 reference requests answered and 12, 900 publications distributed!
It is clear that AWIC has advanced from an unknown to an internationally known resource in the last decade. By way of illustration, while completing a recent monthly report, we noted that we had requests for our publications from Sweden, Switzerland, India, Hong Kong, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Puerto Rico, and South Korea. [Ed. note-AWIC was recently asked to cooperate with USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service Emergency Programs and the Government of Taiwan as it battles a serious outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that threatens the Taiwanese swine industry.] This list over the years has included most major countries. Lest you worry that we are only sending out materials and not receiving anything back, let me reassure you. It appears that as a result of our generosity, we have been sent many publications and subscriptions that are now included in the NAL collection. It is my experience we have gained many items that would be difficult to obtain any other way.
Also in 1990, we published what may end up being considered our most useful grant product. We entered into a cooperative agreement with Dr. Taylor Bennett of the University of Illinois at Chicago to produce a manual of basic animal handling research procedures. The manual is entitled Essentials for Animal Research: A Primer for Investigators. It was our largest print run ever. More than 7,000 copies were printed and distributed within about 2 years. This document has been used by many institutions as a textbook for beginning students, a laboratory resource, a library reference book, etc. We recently published a second edition which was distributed in both electronic and paper copy. It is now once again out-of-print but is available on the AWIC website at http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/pubs/noawicpubs/essentia.htm
We began collaborations with other groups when we worked with the National Institutes of Health, Office of Protection From Research Risks, and the National Library of Medicine to produce Information Resources for Environmental Enrichment of Primates -- a bibliography and resource manual on psychological well-being of primates. The availability of the document from NAL/AWIC was announced in the Federal Register. This publication has also been updated with the help of additional collaborators -- the Primate Information Center, and Dr. Viktor Reinhardt.
Our first venture into the training arena occurred May 23-24, 1991, when we held a workshop at NAL on "How to Use NAL for Animal Welfare Information." We still conduct this workshop -- now titled Meeting the Information Requirements of the Animal Welfare Act -- as a regularly scheduled activity. Normally, we conduct it at NAL three times per year. We also take it on the road to distant venues on a cost-recovery basis. We have provided it to major companies such as Johnson and Johnson, 3M, and Monsanto, to staff at several universities, and as a continuing education course for librarians and scientists. Actually, for those who take the course at NAL, they receive certificates signed by the Director of the Library and the APHIS Deputy Administrator for Animal Care. Over 2,000 people have taken some form of the class, and participants have come from as far away as Germany, Canada, and Puerto Rico.
In 1991, AWIC won the American Library Association's John Cotton Dana Award for outstanding public relations among special libraries. The citation reads "For a multifaceted public relations program to increase awareness and use of the Animal Welfare Center through effective outreach activities." It was a nice moment of recognition for a creative, dedicated, and hard-working staff.
In 1992, we began a collaboration with Dr. J. Fox of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to produce a bibliography on ferrets used in biomedical research. This has proved to be so comprehensive that a group organized to provide information on ferrets has used it as the basis of a database of bibliographic information on ferrets.
This year (1992) was also the beginning of an initiative of the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing to convene a congress, in Baltimore, on the topic of alternatives and animal use in the life sciences. AWIC supported this effort with funding and planning time. This initiative -- The First World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences: Education, Research, and Testing -- was attended by about 600 people from around the world. It was considered so successful that a second Congress was held in Utrecht, The Netherlands in October 1996. A third Congress is being planned for Italy in 1999.
AWIC also provided the important level of funding for the First International Conference for Veterinary Information Specialists. It was held in 1992 in Reading, England. We were able to interact with people from Africa, all of Europe, South America, etc. Here again, this has turned into an ongoing activity. In 1997, there will be a conference in Frederiksberg, Denmark.
In the last few years, we have had several fruitful collaborations with both the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) of the United Kingdom and with the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF ) of New Zealand. With UFAW we produced the recently published Environmental Enrichment Information Resources for Laboratory Animals and with MAF we have exchanged many important publications. We now have a complete set of MAF's codes of practice that detail appropriate care and husbandry of animals in New Zealand. These have been used by USDA staff who have been working on regulations for farm animals used in biomedical research.
AWIC staff have provided extensive searches for the committees that worked to update the Institute of Laboratory Animal Resources (ILAR) Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, and for the Guide for the Care and Use of Agricultural Animals in Agricultural Research and Teaching.
One offbeat activity was being filmed for the Italian TV program Super Quark -- a program specializing in science and technology issues.
Before saying a few words about the future, I would like to give you some usage statistics for some of the basic activities of AWIC.
In our first 10 years we have:
About 45 percent of our users are researchers, technicians, veterinarians, IACUC members and exhibitor/dealers, 30 percent are educators or students and organization members, and the rest are government, Members of Congress, private citizens, librarians, etc.
The five initial planners have offered monetary resources and/or products and services -- databases, computer expertise, subject-matter expertise, etc. AWIC will contribute relevant electronic products as well as the AWIC staff time and expertise in searching for alternatives to painful procedures. P&G and HSUS have agreed to contribute seed money to cover initial planning, administrative, hardware, and software costs.
Needless to say, such an electronic-based system will require additional funds, resources, technical guidance, and the efforts of many groups to bring it to fruition. We invite your support with ideas and resources -- be they electronic or monetary to participate in this initiative so we can begin to deal more effectively with helping investigators find the best available research models.
The Animal Welfare Information Center has faced many hurdles in its first 10 years. As with all Federal agencies, we are being asked to provide continuing services with fewer resources. It is through collaborations such as this that AWIC will continue to provide quality information resources to our patrons during our second decade.
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The Animal Welfare Information Center
U.S. Department of Agriculture
Agricultural Research Service
National Agricultural Library
10301 Baltimore Ave.
Beltsville, MD 20705-2351
Phone: (301) 504-6212
FAX: (301) 504-7125
Contact us: http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/contact.php
