Contact: Sammy McDavid
A Mississippi State University architectural program is working to provide Northeast Mississippi with a centralized information resource for community planning and design.
The School of Architecture's Small Town Center recently set up the Mississippi Electronic Almanac, a Web-based reference for 23 counties, all but one served by the Appalachian Regional Commission. The ARC, the Tupelo-based CREATE Foundation and MSU's Office of Research are providing funding for the year-long project.
"The almanac is designed to provide a compendium of organized and correlated information from varying sources and of various forms," said project director Nils Gore. "We also plan for it to serve as a model for other ARC regions and for other regions of the state."
On the Internet, the almanac may be accessed at http://almanac.sarc.msstate.edu/. Also, printed copies of the abstract describing the project in greater detail are available through the Small Town Center.
Created in 1965, the ARC is a federal-state-local government partnership that provides funding for economic and social development programs in and near the Appalachian Mountain region of the Eastern United States. Mississippi counties include Alcorn, Benton, Calhoun, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Clay, Itawamba, Kemper, Lee, Lowndes, Marshall, Monroe, Noxubee, Oktibbeha, Pontotoc, Prentiss, Tippah, Tishomingo, Union, Webster, Winston, and Yalobusha. Though not in the ARC district, Lafayette County also will be included in the reference.
"The almanac project grew out of the recognition that one of the greatest impediments to successful community design and development is the lack of access to information resources," Gore said.
While numerous state and federal agencies exist to support community development, and while maps, charts, records, and the like exist for all parts of the state, "these resources are widely scattered and, for the most part, unconnected," he observed.
To make his point, Gore made an Internet search for the subject "Mississippi and maps." Using a common search engine, his effort yielded more than 1.1 million entries.
"Once this information is obtained, it must be coordinated, a task of excessive proportions since each document is a unique item in its own format," he said.
Among other things, the new ready-reference is or will be listing all public agencies available to serve community interests and needs, as well as professions and professional services relevant to community design.
Also included will be:
--Field analyses and case studies developed by the Small Town Center of up to 10 regional communities for use as models to identify broad community development opportunities.
--A collection of physical representations or descriptions of the ARC region. These include maps, surveys, aerial photographs, zoning ordinances, and related material.
--Internet-available three-dimensional modeling and visualization capabilities provided by the architecture school. These will include interactive visualizations and analyses of the region, its counties and communities.