Animal Welfare Information Center resources
The 1985 amendments to the Animal Welfare Act established the Animal Welfare Information Center (AWIC), an information service at the USDA National Agricultural Library. AWIC’s mission is to provide information pertinent to employee training that could prevent unintended duplication of animal experimentation and on improved research methods that could reduce or replace animal use and minimize pain and distress to animals.
Within the National Agricultural Library website, AWIC provides information to the toxicology community related to the development and use of alternatives to toxicity testing, as well as information and guidelines on mandatory and regulatory testing set by various agencies. These web pages highlight peer-reviewed publications and other online resources that discuss ways to replace, reduce, and refine animal use in toxicity testing. A major update of the website in 2022 improved user experience and streamlined information discovery; a new introductory video gives an overview of AWIC resources.
During 2022 and 2023, 340,587 people visited the AWIC website. These visits generated a total of 580,863 page views. AWIC also provides information on animal use alternatives through outlets such as presentations and posters, workshops, webinars, and conference exhibits. Through these outlets, AWIC presented to over 4,348 participants at 78 different outreach events in 2022 and 2023, collectively. At these outreach events, AWIC described best practices for searching and finding current literature on methods to reduce, refine, or replace animal use in testing and experimentation.
AWIC offers workshops on meeting the requirements of the Animal Welfare Act. These workshops provide guidance on where to find 3Rs literature and resources, instruction on database literature searching techniques (e.g., search syntax), and demonstration of alternatives literature searches. They are free and open to the public. During 2022 and 2023 AWIC presented six of these workshops to a total of 789 attendees. Information about upcoming workshops is available on the AWIC website. This page also provides a link to online on-demand self-paced training for users unable to participate in a live workshop.