Week 13/November 26

Resources

NAL Agricultural Thesaurus - http://agclass.nal.usda.gov/agt/agt.htm

            The National Agriculture Library Agricultural Thesaurus was created to aid people who are creating software, catalogs, books, databases and various other materials in the field of agriculture. It was specifically developed for the USDA and the Agricultural Research Service.  It is available online, without a subscription.  Its users would be primary scholars in the field, not students.  This is a highly technical thesaurus and would be difficult for the average user. It is set up much like the Library of Congress Subject heading but is available for browsing and searching online.  The thesaurus uses indicators like NT (narrower term) and UF (use for).  It includes equivalence, hierarchical and associative relationships. It is limited in use by the subject area only. 

 AGRICOLA - http://www.nal.usda.gov/ag98

     AGRICOLA is the index of the National Agricultural Library.  It contains citations of articles and other agricultural literature.  The database goes back to the 15th century.  Many of the citations are linked to full-text sources.  It is available online  and on CD-Rom.  It is used by students, researchers and agriculture professionals.  AGRICOLA has two halves, an online catalog that indexes books, serials and other items; and a journal article citation index.  Many citations include abstracts. Records are available in MARC format.  I found it to be easy to navigate and search.

 AgNIC - http://www.agnic.org/

    AgNIC is an online, searchable database offering abstracts and full-text access to agricultural resources.  The resources indexed are provided by universities and organizations around the country and by the National Agriculture Library.  AgNIC attempts to links the small collections of various groups to create one “global” database.  Each member specializes on a field of agriculture, for instance Michigan State University focuses on cultivated blueberries.  It is meant as a resource for researchers in the field.  It is limited only by the number of entries produced by each member.

Professional Horticulture & Agriculture Catalog - http://www.ag.uiuc.edu/~vista/catalog/professional/

The Professional Horticulture and Agriculture catalog provides access to citations of many resources.  It is meant to provide information to people working in the fields of agriculture and horticulture.  The catalog includes newsletters, pamphlets and videos.  It is an online resource.  Because it is a commercial catalog, the PHAC is limited to only the publications that are sold by the Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences Department of the University of Illinois.  The site purports to also be of use to university faculty and students for teaching and research.  The only search option available is very simple.  It provides a list of items available for sale, including a short abstract, and a link for an order form.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Online Catalogue – http://www4.fao.org/faobib/index.html

This catalogue gives access to the collection of the FAO, with many items dating back to the 1940s.  It includes a thesaurus to assist searchers and has both advanced and basic searches.  The catalogue serves the needs of the members of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the public.  It is intended to provide easy access to information about food and agriculture.  It is limited by the number of items in the collection.  One interesting item is that the browse and search features are multilingual.  Browsing for Morocco shows listing for Maroc (french) as well.  I was unable to get the search function to provide more than an alphabetical lists of terms.  The browse feature produced a nice list with links to citations.

Relevance

 
Total documents in collection 100 100 100
Number relevant in collection 16 16 16
Number retrieved 10 30 60
Number relevant and retrieved 5 10 15
Precision a b c
Recall d e f

Give values for (accurate to two decimal points):
a. 50.00%
b. 33.33%
c. 25.00%
d. 31.25%
e. 62.50%
f.  93.75%

Erika A. McCoy
eamccoy@jhu.edu
Updated November 26, 2002 1