Summary of AGRICOLA Survey and Recommendations to NAL
USAIN's AGRICOLA Interest Group conducted a survey of AGRICOLA users in February 1998. Most survey respondents rated AGRICOLA generally an excellent to very good database. AGRICOLA was listed most often when survey respondents were asked to list their five most used databases. Our survey also showed strong agreement with AGRICOLA's emphasis on core research journals and U.S. government publications in all fields related to agriculture. We were also pleased to find that NAL produces AGRICOLA records with a full journal title field and an abbreviated journal title field. Most survey respondents wanted to see the full journal title. USAIN will pursue this situation with SilverPlatter and other vendors who choose to show only the abbreviated title field.
NAL provides an extremely important function by producing AGRICOLA. USAIN strongly supports NAL in this endeavor and would like to see an even greater commitment of staff and resources to it.
Areas identified in the survey and through AGRICOLA Interest Group discussions where we would like to see NAL place even greater emphasis are:
- Include abstracts in as many records as possible.
- Include indexing for as many book chapters as possible.
- Index all USDA publications including regional publications which are sometimes missed.
- Facilitate the inclusion of state experiment station and extension publications.
- Give special consideration to the importance of timeliness in indexing all materials.
- Improve the interface and searching capabilities of the free internet version of AGRICOLA.
Again we want to emphasize the importance of AGRICOLA to the agricultural community and thank NAL for its efforts in producing this database. The free internet version of AGRICOLA will be a strong component of the Rural Information project and an important link on the AgNIC web pages. USAIN and its AGRICOLA Interest Group strongly support NAL's continuing efforts to improve and expand the AGRICOLA database.