Rural Center of AIDS and STD Prevention

The Rural Center for AIDS/STD Prevention (RCAP) will be funded by CDC for a period of 1 year, beginning March 1st, 2010. RCAP provides service and support to prevention efforts related to HIV/AIDS in rural America. Dr. Crosby will be a Co-Director of RCAP for this 1-year cycle. In this role, he will be responsible for assisting the Director (from Indiana University) and the other Co-Director (from the University of Colorado) to plan and evaluate all RCAP activities, including the planning and implementation of the national conference in 2011. Dr. Crosby will finalize development of the web-based service (Project CREATE - create rural education AIDS targeted efforts) and conduct a pilot test of this service in the spring of 2010. In the summer of 2010, he will supervise final implementation and staffing to allow the project to serve rural HIV/STD prevention professionals for the remainder of year 5. Dr. Crosby will work with Dr. Seth Noar to finalize the design and operation of the web site used for project CREATE. The web site will allow people to custom design HIV prevention materials specifically to meet the needs of various rural populations they may serve. Dr. Noar is an expert in the use of interactive media and is therefore highly qualified to inform this effort. Drs. Crosby and Noar have also secured the assistance of a two highly qualified graduate students who will perform much of weekly work that goes into the development of this interactive service. Finally, the two graduate students will work closely with a technical assistant (Mr. Scott Johnson) who will be responsible for media manipulation to support various poster sizes images imported into database and to support attributes stored in database. His media manipulation will also support taglines imported into database. He will re-design the web site as needed and create a poster preview and ordering process. Working with Drs. Crosby and Noar, he will create order processing interface and develop an online process for approving or rejecting poster submissions. He will also generate graphics files and upload to the server.