Ten years ago, University of Illinois Extension launched its Urban Program Resources Network website, www.urbanext.uiuc.edu, with 40 offerings. Today, that service includes 285 different websites with information ranging from child care to selecting trees and plants for your lawn to sciences and social science lessons used in classrooms around the world.

"We saw the site as a new way to share and deliver U of I Extension programs to urban and rural audiences," explained Jane Scherer, U of I Extension urban programs specialist who supervises the website. "It just took off and we try to keep up with a growing demand for easily accessible, fact-based information from a neutral source." Respect for its information is represented by the fact that over 5,000 other websites have linked to it. Over 180 million page views have been recorded on the site in the past 10 years and the monthly average over the last six months is 4.7 million.

The most popular offering is The Great Plant Escape, a site that provides education in plant science for third through fifth graders."It is part of our 'Schools Online' section," Scherer explained. "This section includes 30 - 40 websites for children with information that helps them better understand the principles of science and social science. It includes curriculum guides so teachers can incorporate the lessons into the classroom."

Many of the sites, especially in the Schools Online section, are interactive. "One of our most used web pages is 'Ask a Horticulturist,'" she related. "People can go online and ask a question of an Extension horticulturist and get a response. We had over 13,000 people visiting that site in June alone."

While 60 percent of the users are in the United States, Scherer noted that the Urban Program Resources site has gone world-wide. "People from 192 different countries use the site," she said. "A number of the pages are offered in Spanish and we recently offered an Arabic translation of the 'Out on a Limb' page which includes lessons in conflict resolution for children. This makes this program available to the 230 million people around the world who speak Arabic."