by Meredith Bauch and Niki Fallen

The major web site creators in the Ft. Lauderdale area are the city and county government, as well as SEFLIN (Southeast Florida Library Information Network), and the Sun Sentinel. There are also a number of commercial sites that are geared to tourism and real estate information. Interesting to note is that the sites easiest to find were commercially based, while it took a little digging to find the others through search engines.

The Ft. Lauderdale city government site is a good source working to provide people with information on city government, city services and information, visiting Ft. Lauderdale, neighborhood news, relocation information, hot topics, and links to other sites. There are links to county government and other commercial sites such as City Net, but no links to non-profit organizations such as SEFLIN. As would be expected, city government is concerned with bringing new businesses and people into their community so a large part of the information is geared towards tourism and relocation.

The Broward county government site offers services similar to the city government. It has a statistical planning and growth section that provides those interested with characteristics of the population, GIS, CAD, and data files, digital air photography, strategic plan, and an electronic atlas. All the constituent agencies affiliated with county government have a piece on the web site. Broward county government did have a link to SEFLIN, and other sites regarding government and city information.

SEFLIN is a non-profit organization of libraries in Broward, Dade, Palm Beach, Martin & Monroe Counties. It is the major non-profit CIS player in South Florida. Anyone may link to the SEFLIN site for free, their motto being a community resource "By the people - For the people." People may also dial into the network for free if they are a resident of the five county area that SEFLIN serves. They will train people or groups that wish to add information to their site. SEFLIN seems to be a resource that is not being utilized to its potential. It is sometimes difficult to find information on an individual topic. A reorganization of their resources may benefit their services, as well as more advertising of what they have to offer.

The Sun Sentinel is the newspaper for Ft. Lauderdale, and has a comprehensive listing of local news and events, Digital City South Florida. What makes the Digital City so successful is the way in which they organize their information. It is extremely easy to find, for instance, information on volunteering.

SEFLIN is the major non-profit, but they serve a total of 5 counties. Ft. Lauderdale community would benefit by having a local non-profit CIS organization available to them. It is hard to find information about SEFLIN on either of the government pages. There are many supporters of SEFLIN and these include organizations such as Digital City South Florida, yet there is no link from Digital City to SEFLIN. Reciprocal agreements between organizations to help support one another would be beneficial to the community as a whole. If there had been no initial indication of the SEFLIN Free-Net through the Community Connector web site, it would have been difficult to find it using a search engine.

Some other links:

http://florida.communityusa.com/fortlauderdale - mainly a shopping site

http://www.browardweb.com/Default.htm - commercial site offering resources on Broward County

http://www.ftlchamber.com/ - chamber of commerce offering fee-based services

http://www.introweb.com/fortlauderdale/mainmenu.htm - tourist info

http://www.ftlauderdalewww.com/AreaGuide/ftlaud.html - tourist info

http://www.gfl.com/fl/ -tourist and real estate