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Pamela André Michal Demeš Tomaz Bartol Aino Kuik Marcela Chrenekova Ilona Dobelniece Ivanka Demireva Ivo Hoch Ctibor Perlin Krystyna Kocznorowska Participants Time schedule Photo documentation < Back |
INSTITUTE FOR SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL INFORMATION FOR AGRICULTURE
- NEW ACTIVITIES, PROJECTS, PERSPECTIVES
Michal DEMEŠ, Ján ŠIMKO, Marcela CHRENEKOVÁ Samova 9 950 10 Nitra SLOVAK REPUBLIC tel: +421/87/522185 fax: +421/87/525275 e-mail: uvtip@uvtip.sk http://www.uvtip.sk The Institute for Scientific and Technical Information for Agriculture (ISTIA) was set up by the Slovak Ministry of Agriculture to provide agricultural scientists with research information in the agricultural sector. Under the terms of this mandate, our institute handles the following projects: IIS VTEI; the Depository Library of FAO Literature; and the input of data onto two FAO databases - AGRIS and CARIS . These two latter are also part of the nation-wide information system. At the beginning of 1996 an Internet server was installed in the Institute, plus a server for the local area network. Both of these have greatly expanded our capacities. The inspiration for our AgroWebClub came up in 1995, and in 1996 it was put on line. AgroWebClub presents a "metainformation" system using the Internet. Its main purpose is to improve communication within Slovak agricultural organizations and provide them with information from foreign sources; it is also intended to provide information on the activities of Slovak agricultural organizations to researchers abroad. By logging on, you are connected with dozens if not hundreds of agricultural database services and institutes worldwide. (Both of these projects by the way are covered in more detail in the poster session.) In view of our personnel and technical equipment, our institute was mandated by the Ministry to present on the Internet Homepages of other institutes in the agricultural sector. We have opened Homepages for the Ministry of Agriculture and the Slovak Academy of Agricultural Sciences, our governing bodies; naturally our own Homepage; and further Homepages of partner organizations in the agricultural sector. We will continue to install Homepages of such organizations as the Veterinary Control and Inspection Offices of the Slovak Republic, agricultural and food producers' associations, and so on. Last year in the sector a ministerial audit was held, and a detailed report was issued on the state of these organizations. ISTIA, based on the conclusions, was asked to analyse single institutes. Their technical equipment and personnel capacities, book funds and information technology had to be judged for their fitness for the demands of the Information Era. Resulting from this work, we devised the Scientific Research Base Project for Internet Connections, which was then put before the Ministry and passed. Its goal is to develop the conditions in the other agricultural institutes for linking up to the Internet . This year a survey of the capacities of international agricultural organizations is being carried out by the Slovak Academy of Agricultural Sciences. A new addition to the Institute as of September 96 was the Information Office for the European Union. Its function is to bring under its umbrella all information sources regarding agricultural policy in the Europe Union. One of its tasks at present is to gather such information for the workers of the Slovak Ministry of Agriculture and the Slovak scientific research base. Workers of the centre are preparing a dictionary of English abbreviations and acronyms taken from agricultural literature, a terminological dictionary for the common agricultural policy of the E.U., and a monthly - Economic Information - containing the latest news from world agriculture and an overview of E.U. legislation. A significant element of the centre's activity is the Study Division and the offering of translating and consultancy services. Our Institute's library serves as a depository library for the FAO and for European Union reference sources, and functions as the reference library for the Institute itself. Information from the EU is held on CDs and is oriented towards legislation, particularly CELEX Justis, the Official Journal of the EC, statistics (EUROSTAT, EUROFARM, OECD Statistical Compendium), and bibliographies (SCAD). All of these are available through our Local Area Network (LAN). On the basis of an agreement with the Publishing Division of the FAO the library has become the distributor of FAO literature for all Slovakia. More information on the library and its services is available on ISTIA's Homepage. Some of these services are available through the Internet. Since the last Roundtable, the Institute has hosted two memorable international events. In September '95 we held a seminar on "Developing practical skills for the Internet and CD-ROM Technology". It was attended by library and information institute staff from Russia, Bielorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine. The second event was the AGROINFOS - FAO conference in November 1996. During it ISTIA worked closely with the Sub-regional Office for Central and Eastern Europe in Budapest. The significance of the conference was heightened by being attended by such leading lights of the Informatics community as Anton Mangstl, Jan Van der Burg, Vladimir Pozdnyakov, Zbigniew Karnicky, Helga Schmid, Iver Thysen and others. ISTIA has enormously expanded its ventures with the FAO. One recent undertaking has been to oversee the FAO book grants to Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Russia, Bielorussia, the Ukraine, Poland and Hungary. In October we also completed the translation of several FAO publications into Slovak, and more are to come. The AGROINFOS conference just mentioned was a true milestone. It opened up for us the road to collaboration with the FAO on a much higher plane, including involvement with the newly opened Sub-regional Office for Central and Eastern Europe in Budapest; the Partnership Program, under which the FAO will bring selected staff members to Rome for further training; and the very recent signing of the Technical Co-operation Project has been quite a victory. Over the 1997 financial year ISTIA will distribute 160,000 dollars US worth of computer equipment, professional training and services among information institutes in Slovakia. This is a very exciting time for ISTIA indeed. And for it, frankly, we have to thank our Director, Michal Demes, who has been indefatigable; and in fact we may because of that lose him to the sub-regional head-hunters in Budapest! Co-operation between ISTIA and IAALD began with our participation two years ago at the IAALD conference in Melbourne. Afterwards, we were able to provide IAALD with up-to-date information on Slovak and Ukrainian institutes and have them entered onto the IAALD international register. Ten Slovak agricultural institutes also joined the association. Another landmark for us was reached thanks to co-operation with IAALD and with its president Jan Van der Burg. During the AGROINFOS conference it was Jan Van der Burg who initiated the founding of the IAALD Chapter for Central and Eastern Europe, based at ISTIA. The first IAALD Quarterly Bulletin for Central and Eastern Europe has already been printed and is available here at the conference if you should wish to take a look at it. Lastly, in the fall of this year we hope to host a further seminar under the title "Developing practical skills for Internet and CD-ROM Technology", this time under the joint sponsorship of IAALD and FAO, under the Technical Co-operation Program mentioned earlier. |
| THE SLOVAK NATIONAL AGRIS/CARIS FAO CENTRE CURRENT STATE AND
PERSPECTIVES
Marcela CHRENEKOVÁ AGRIS/CARIS FAO ISTIA Samova 9 950 10 Nitra SLOVAK REPUBLIC e-mail : chrenekova@uvtip.sk tel./fax: 00421/87/23280 The Institute for Scientific and Technical Information for Agriculture (ISTIA) has a well-developed history of cooperation with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Within ISTIA, one of the main departments is the Slovak National AGRIS/CARIS FAO Centre. The most significant change for our centre since the last Roundtable conference has been its move from Bratislava to Nitra at the end of 1995. The staff also turned over. Our former head went to the David Lublin Library in Rome, and the staff who lived in Bratislava stayed there. A participant in AGRIS since 1974, yearly Slovakia processes about 700 records onto the database, drawing them from about 35 periodicals, conference proceedings, monographs and similar sources, and from grey literature. We have also started to process films screened at the annual Agrofilm international festival of agricultural films held in Nitra; in coming years we would like to celebrate the authors of films screened at the ENVIROFILM and EKOTOPFILM festivals held in Banska Bystrica and Zilina. Future plans also include handling patents and norms. This task is made easier by the fact that the Slovak Institute for Technical Norms processes patents and norms under the same Micro CDS/ISIS software; it remains merely to solve the problem of converting into our CDS/ISIS - AGRIN. In 1996 we met our goal to increase the number of records with abstracts; from 30 percent, we have reached 69.9 percent. The specialist public gives preference to records with abstracts, which lend the possibility of very quickly getting detailed information on methods, state of investigation, procedures and conclusions. The world standard in scientific and specialised literature requests such annotated records, whose inclusion in the journal increases its rating. We fully understand however that the solution of this problem is beyond our mandate. Within Slovakia we have a number of well-functioning sub-centres. Four of them are AGRIS and 31 CARIS. The use of an international agricultural information system and our contribution to it is in the national interest of Slovakia, as made clear in the officially declared intention of the Slovak Republic to share in the activity of FAO in the exchange of scientific, social and economic information oriented to agriculture. It may therefore seem that there is general comprehension of the need for our work. But when the CARIS project went ahead and the necessary steps were taken for the preparation of data and for the mapping and classifying of information sources for CARIS, we nonetheless did not meet with the expected enthusiastic response from the communities concerned. It would seem as if the notion of contributing to the CARIS system, presenting Slovak agricultural research to the world and integrating it into the world information system, aroused the mistrust of our scientific community. We hope this changes, and seek ways of demonstrating the advantages of inclusion into CARIS. But change is slow. At the moment we are placing yearly into the CARIS database 50 projects on-going in research institutes under the Ministry of Agriculture and in the Slovak Academy of Agricultural Sciences. We expect the number to increase this year to around 200, as our sub-centres in The Slovak Agricultural University and the Forestry faculty of The Technical University complete processing of all their research projects. As concerns the co-ordinating centre for FAO AGRIS and CARIS in Rome, our work is judged positively, and we have been asked to testify as to the efficiency and working practicality of the newly developed CARIS software. In APU Vienna, the AGRIS input moderated discussion group has been revitalized by the Internet. The group is highly valuable to us, for questions regarding input protocol still come up. No matter that from year to year the quality of professional literature rises, there yet remains in some periodicals a backwater in the area of the quality of the English language abstracts. Recently our work has been affected by a drop in the number of Slovak periodicals and the very small quantity of specialised monographs. It's important to realize that these databases, speaking realistically, offer our scientific workers the sole means whereby the results of their work (even if only bibliographic details) can reach the wider world. Precisely through searches of the databases do these results reach the user and become part of the living information network. When information enters other databases on the basis of strict selection criteria, which among other things includes the insistence that the data have been centrally processed, the AGRIS and CARIS databases, through the system of national sub-centres, make it possible to map and present the information on a national scale. The possibilities of presenting the results of Slovak science to the world are therefore much greater. If we compare the number of records by Slovak authors on the CAB Abstracts database and on the AGRIS database, over a certain period (1995- July 1996) the CAB Abstracts are found to contain 166 records, whereas the AGRIS hold 743. This number bears out my earlier contention about the usefulness of Agris. Apart from the activities spoken of, on the request of the scientific public our centre carries out searches in the AGRIS database, CARIS database, in CAB abstracts, AGRICOLA, AGRISEARCH, FAOSTAT and on the Internet. In October 1996 we finished a project to translate and publish FAO literature. We have translated and published four publications: "Computerized systems of land resources appraisal for agricultural development", that is a textbook for using GIS; "Inter-country Comparisons of agricultural output and productivity"; "Agricultural research policy and development"; "Agricultural sustainability: definition and implications for agricultural trade policy", which deals with problems all too topical in Slovakia. We are proud to have been the institute which undertook these translations - the first translations of FAO publications into any Slavonic language. Last but not least, we run the AgroWebClub, whose purpose is to connect up through the Internet societies of users and contributors to the agricultural information system. This includes services and tools such as WWW, FTP, mailing lists, e-mail, and so on. A more detailed description can be found in the poster session. In the very near future we also plan to implement mailing lists devoted to specialised topics. Let me suggest that the first of them be a Roundtable Family mailing list. Would you agree? |
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