Report on
Discussion Forum on Information Services in the Asia-Pacific
and
AGRIS/CARIS in the 21st Century
an Asia-Pacific Regional Consultation

Edited by Michael Ibach and Yvonne Byron

AGRIS/CARIS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

REPORT ON THE ASIA-PACIFIC REGIONAL CONSULTATION

4 - 6 NOVEMBER 1996

BOGOR, INDONESIA

List of Acronyms

[Chapter 1]
Recommendation

[Chapter 2]
FAO, WAICENT, AGRIS, CARIS Forestry Information Services for the 21st Century

[Chapter 3]
Activities of the Forestry Department of FAO in Relation to Research and Information

[Chapter 4]
Principles of Abstracting and Indexing as applied by CAB International

[Chapter 5]
Can We See the Forest for the Trees?

[Chapter 6]
Improving Access to Forestry Information: the Experience of FORSPA

[Chapter 7]
IUFRO and Collaboration Possibilities of Enhancing with AGRIS/CARIS

Country Reports:

Bangladesh

China

India

Indonesia

Japan

Pakistan

Papua New Guinea

Philippines

Phillippines 2

SEAMEO

South Korea

Thailand

Vietnam

Western Samoa

[Appendix 1]
List of Participants

STATUS OF FORESTRY INFORMATION IN INDIA

Amrish Sharma

National Forest Library and Information Centre, Indian Council of Forestry

Research and Education, Dehra Dun, India

Access to the increasing amount of knowledge available needs to be rationalised to reduce costs of accessing information in terms of time and money. This paper provides an overview of the information services and features of the National Forest Library and Information Centre, Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (NFLIC), India.

CD ROM NETWORKING

During 1995, the National Forest Library and Information Centre (NFLIC) installed a CD-ROM Network to allow multiple users to access the CD-ROM disks. Those available include TREE-CD, CAB-CD, ECODISC, AGRICOLA, AGRIS, Biological Abstracts, Woods of the World, Science Citations Index, ANICAP and Agricultural Economics CD.

The CD-ROM database facility extends through the National Informatics Centre Network to all the other institutes of ICFRE and forest universities and State forest research institutes. The users outside Dehra Dun can access the CD Juke box and download desired information from the CD database. Regular training programmes are conducted at NFLIC for users on CD-NET databases. As more databases are acquired, better equipment is needed to improve access and reduce waiting time for users.

GREY LITERATURE

An enormous amount of information in forestry is available in informal publications. These include doctoral theses, post-graduate dissertations, PG Diploma assignments, working plans/schemes, institutional and departmental reports, pre-prints, newsletters, articles in local newspapers and magazines, proceedings of local and regional seminars, minutes of meetings/conferences, and proceedings of professional get-togethers.

NFLIC has a unique grey literature collection on forestry in India, from the inception of forestry research in 1875 to the present day. Literature acquired from such non-conventional sources are abstracted, classified, indexed, referenced and filed. For every article, index cards and reference sheets are prepared for author, subject and plant species. The miscellaneous literature is kept in files by subject and plant species. Over 100 000 index cards and 6600 files are maintained.

For management of this grey literature at the National Forest Library and Information Centre, a machine-readable system would be useful. In addition to participation in the regional and national networks, sharing grey literature maintained on machine readable language by various forestry research organisations across geographical boundaries is made easier. The documents can be scanned and the keywords identified for searching. The classification number could also be stored. Once this database is set up, CDs could be made for distribution.

PUBLISHING WITHOUT PAPER

The Indian Forester, a pioneer journal of forestry research since 1875, is very closely associated with the continued advancement of forestry, and is a storehouse of forestry information for researchers in forestry science. However, this valuable document is gradually becoming inaccessible due to problems with preserving old documents. The retrieval process from these journals is very tedious and time consuming. To preserve these documents they should be stored on electronic media. This will also ease the retrieval process. The necessary groundwork has already been started.

Today's available electronic publishing tools can create publications that can be viewed, navigated, annotated and distributed via CD-ROM, over a network, or through an on-line service.

Similarly we are planning to create a CD-ROM for all internal publications of ICFRE. This will allow the user to access the information easily from remote stations via the WAN (Wide Area Network) which is already established.

INFORMATION SERVICES AND PRODUCTS

To keep forest scientists informed about the latest scientific and technical information, the following services are available:

• Retrospective Search Services (RSS) from in-house databases, CD-ROM and on-line information systems, for different outside organisations or in-house demands;
  
• Current Awareness Services (CAS) of the new reading materials;
  
• Automated Selective Dissemination of Information Service (ASDIS) personalised to meet specific needs of the user community by maintaining a user profile and subject profile of all the sectors of industry and running this profile bi-monthly against on-line searches. It can provide information from the world's leading databases;
  
• Document Delivery Service (DDS/CAPPS) provides photocopies of the contents pages and author abstracts of the selected core titles of reference from the list of acquired journals on forestry science and applied geo-sciences. Papers from core journals, research papers and references from CAS, RSS, etc. are available on price basis;
  
• CD-ROM Based Information Service (CDIS) for providing information services to forestry as a whole by creating a subset of wider database available in CD-ROM;
  
• On-line Alert Service (OAS) exploiting the on-line databases to provide an alert service according to the requirements of different segments and directly mailing the information to the users.

CONCLUSION

More than two years after starting the computerisation activities at the Centre, we are now seeing the benefits of our earlier planning; usage in all sections is increasing, and the profile of information services has been considerably improved in the process. I believe that we need to continue with provision of user-friendly information services and that researchers are trained and educated to make the fullest use of the information services.