The environmental scanning project at the University of Georgia Center for Continuing Education is described. The project attempts to identify signals of change in all sectors of the external environment. Information resources have been selected from the social, technological, economic, and political aspects of the environment at the international, national, regional, and state levels. A process has been designed to ensure that these resources are systematically and regularly reviewed. After describing the history, structure, and circumstances leading to the project, details are provided of how the structure was established and how the system operates to provide strategic direction in organizational and program planning. The benefits, costs, problems, and issues experienced in about 15 months of operating the system are also discussed. Experiences with the University of Georgia system are also compared with those of the University of Minnesota. A scanning taxonomy that can be used to classify abstracts produced in the environmental scanning process is appended, along with a sample abstract, a list of resources being scanned, and a list of issues identified by environmental scanning in 1985-1986. (SW)