Advancing Water Resources Research and Management
|
Advancing Water Resources Research and Management |
| Symposium on Water Resources and the World Wide Web |
|---|
| Seattle, Washington, December 5-9, 1999 |
The mission of the National Agricultural Library (NAL) is to ensure and enhance access to information related to agriculture. In support of this mission, NAL produces AGRICOLA, an electronic database of the agricultural literature. This bibliographic database was created in 1970 and became available on the Web in 1998.
This paper describes an initiative at NAL to help people locate freely available, online publications related to water resources and agriculture. The goal is to develop an easily accessible digital collection composed of relevant electronic publications scattered across many Web sites. Using established library standards, NAL is creating electronic bibliographic records in AGRICOLA for these online publications. Persons looking for information on water and agriculture can find bibliographic records for relevant electronic publications in AGRICOLA that are listed along with records for material in other formats, such as print. When someone searches AGRICOLA and finds a digital document of interest, he or she can click on the Web address in the record to go directly to the document on the Internet.
NAL, located in Beltsville, Maryland, is one of four United States national libraries, along with the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and the National Library of Education. NAL is part of USDA's Agricultural Research Service.
NAL's mission is to ensure and enhance access to agricultural information to improve the quality of life. As the world's largest agricultural library, NAL is an important resource for people working on agricultural issues, including issues related to water and agriculture.
The Water Quality Information Center assists individuals looking for information on water quality topics related to agriculture by providing information via the World Wide Web at http://www.nal.usda.gov/wqic/. Examples of water quality information available electronically include bibliographies; listings of upcoming meetings and Internet discussion groups covering water issues; and annotated links to water-related databases and Internet sites providing information on topics such as Pfiesteria, water quality models and funding sources for water quality improvement.
The center also manages Enviro-News, an Internet mailing list that provides timely environmental news to nearly five hundred subscribers. See Makuch (1999) for a more complete discussion of NAL's electronic information initiatives covering water topics.
An additional responsibility of the center is to improve NAL's water-related information resources: the center identifies and recommends additions to NAL's collection, forwards items to the library's gift and exchange program and works to strengthen water quality coverage in AGRICOLA.
NAL's Web version of AGRICOLA allows you to search either the online public access catalog (containing books, serials, audiovisuals, and other resources) or the journal article citation index (which has journal articles, book chapters and short reports). Both provide you the choice of three interfaces with which to conduct searches.
AGRICOLA on the Web can be searched by
Once you identify a title of interest, you can display the catalog card that provides additional information. An example catalog card is shown in Figure 1. Note that from the catalog card screen, you can access the document's U.S. MARC record.
MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) is the primary international library standard for representation and communication of bibliographic information in machine-readable form. Libraries create MARC records for material in their collections and add the records to their online catalogs and to shared databases. Elements of a MARC record are assigned tagged or coded fields that are further broken into subfields. For example, the 245 field is always the title of the work. The values that are entered in the two spaces after "245" govern the ability to search the entire record by title. The remainder of the 245 field is broken into subfields that show exactly how the title and author's name appear on the work.
Other parts of the record describe the physical item and its subject in detail. Some basic elements, for example, are various standard control numbers, classification numbers like the Library of Congress classification number, the author's name, publisher, place and date of publication, notes about content and subject headings. As with the title field, the tagging or coding of the various parts of the record governs whether and how the record may be found by searching by that element. The MARC record is a precise and standard description of an item and is an ideal tool for storage and retrieval of bibliographic records in shared online databases. Figure 2 shows the MARC tags that underlie the catalog card information in Figure 1.
To see which water-related journals are indexed in AGRICOLA, consult the List of Journals Indexed in AGRICOLA (available at http://www.nal.usda.gov/indexing/ljiarch.htm) which is produced annually. Examples of water-related journals listed in the 1999 edition include Water Resources Management, Journal of Soil and Water Conservation and Water Supply.
The primary goals shared by OCLC and NAL for the Internet Cataloging Project were to:
Using new software tools tested in the Internet Cataloging Project, libraries would be able to provide the same direct access to Internet material as Internet search engines do, but with two additional advantages. One advantage of library catalogs is that they allow the user to search and retrieve information far more precisely than one can when using an Internet search engine. Cataloging tools such as standardized subject category codes, subject headings and other search features help researchers limit narrow retrieval to an extent not possible with standard search engines. This has become increasingly important as the Web has grown and Web searches have begun to retrieve thousands of irrelevant records. Another advantage of searching a library catalog is that in an online library catalog users can find records for Internet publications along with records for books, journals, audiovisual material and other resources in a given subject (Dillon, 1996).
At NAL, our participation in the Internet Cataloging Project was the start of a commitment to catalog Internet resources that are in scope for our library. When we choose Internet resources for inclusion in AGRICOLA, we base our decision on NAL's Collection Development Policy (available at http://www.nal.usda.gov/acq/cdatnal.htm). In most ways, Internet titles are handled as print material is. However, there are a few unique problems, most centering around the ephemeral nature of Internet resources and the labor-intensive activity they require. To identify appropriate Internet resources for the collection, library selectors must check producers' Web sites to see if new material has appeared. This is quite different from choosing print material, for which we have many standard systems for notification and review of new material. Another difficult problem with handling Internet resources is maintaining the validity of the URLs (Universal Resource Locators or Web addresses) in our catalog. We have begun to run link-checking software that returns a report of broken links, but the repair of the links requires human intervention. We are in the process of teaching library staff how to resolve problems with broken links and update our database.
To help people more efficiently identify, locate and access electronic publications covering water and agriculture, the Water Quality Information Center and other NAL staff began a project to catalog these publications in AGRICOLA. Center staff select the publications, check to see that they are not already in the AGRICOLA and then send the titles and URLs to the Acquisitions and Serials Branch. There they are reviewed to ensure they conform to NAL's collection development policy and then are passed on to the Cataloging Branch, where staff create bibliographic records that are added to AGRICOLA.
Water Quality Information Center staff become aware of new electronic publications primarily by checking water-related Web sites and through announcements on Internet mailing lists and in print newsletters. A title will be sent to cataloging if it
Between November 1998 (when the project began) and August 1999, bibliographic records for approximately 250 electronic publications covering water and agriculture were added to AGRICOLA. As of August 1999, the center has identified approximately fifty additional titles to send to cataloging. All of the resources selected by the center are single reports as opposed to journals or journal articles, and many are digital versions of material that has also been issued on paper. If NAL has already cataloged a paper copy of the report, catalogers simply add the note "Also available via remote access" and the URL in an 856 field to the record for the paper copy. If NAL has not cataloged the report in print format, the cataloger creates a new record for the digital version that describes only the digital version. Either way, the URL for the report appears in the record as a hyperlink. Creating MARC records for these reports has been fairly straightforward, and the project has gone smoothly. The center will continue to identify relevant documents and forward them for inclusion in AGRICOLA, so NAL's virtual collection of water quality resources will continue to grow.
Instructions for searching AGRICOLA are found on the AGRICOLA Web pages. In general, to find an online publication on a water-related topic, you would construct a search that pairs a "water" term (or terms) with a term that identifies electronic publications. NAL plans to add the term "Internet-resource" to field 655 in the MARC record. "Internet-resource" could then be searched as a keyword. A search using the "water" term and "Internet-resource" would then find all publications in the database on this particular topic that were accessible online. This capability is not yet available (as of August 1999).
Figure 3 shows an example of an AGRICOLA record for an online publication. Note that the "Access Info." field contains the publication's URL. This is a hyperlink, so clicking on it will take you to the document. Also, at the bottom of the screen is a "http://" button. This will also take you to the document. Figure 4 shows the MARC record for this document. In the MARC record, the hyperlinked "Access Info." field is the 856 field.
Unlike most of the print documents that are cataloged in AGRICOLA, NAL does not own, i. e., physically possess, the vast majority of the electronic publications covering water and agriculture that are being cataloged. These documents reside on the publishers' servers. Although NAL plans to maintain valid URLs in our AGRICOLA records, the library, like other libraries that participated in the Internet Cataloging Project, will not archive the Internet resources that it catalogs. We have to rely on each organization that publishes on the Internet to maintain a file of its own publications, and therefore we have no guarantee that the material will always be available. The ephemeral nature of Internet resources is a troubling issue.
As NAL continues to catalog water-related Internet resources, we expect to make additional adjustments to accommodate the unique features of Internet resources as library material. We need to improve work flow between the Water Quality Information Center and the Cataloging Branch, possibly by using a different method of routing newly selected Internet resources. Some staff, particularly library technicians who are not yet Internet-proficient, need additional training to perform new job functions like those related to link-checking. Staff who choose new Internet resources for cataloging may find and use software that helps organize Internet sites and that reports changes in marked sites. As we improve the way we do this work, we expect that aspects of the work new to us now will become routine and will be done more quickly, and this in turn will result in larger numbers of valuable citations in AGRICOLA.
Benefits from the project are that bibliographic records are being created in accordance with established library standards. This will aid retrieval of these records. And the records are being added to a major, well-established database of the agricultural literature. In this way, people looking for information on water and agriculture can search a single, well-defined source, AGRICOLA, and find bibliographic citations for relevant information from a variety of information providers in a variety of media. And unlike accessing information contained in NAL's physical holdings (books, journals, audiovisuals), for online publications being added through this project, hyperlinking provides nearly instant, desktop access to the information twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week
D
D
D
D
Acknowledgement: Special thanks to Stan Kosecki for his assistance with the graphics and HTML validation of this document.
1. Joseph R. Makuch, Ph.D.
Coordinator, Water Quality Information Center
National Agricultural Library
10301 Baltimore Ave.
Beltsville, MD 20705
Phone: 301/504-6077
Fax: 301/504-7098
Email: jmakuch@nal.usda.gov
URL: www.nal.gov/wqic/
2. Ellen Pletsch Hamilton
Collection Development Librarian
National Agricultural Library
10301 Baltimore Ave.
Beltsville, MD 20705
Phone: 301/504-5569
Fax: 301/504-5243
Email: ehamilto@nal.usda.gov
 | |
| Symposium TOC | AWRA Home page |
Maintainer: AWRA Webserver Team
Copyright © 1999 American Water Resources Association
Content produced by U.S. Government employees as part of official duties is not subject to copyright.