CU-developed agriculture Web portal to aid Third World unveiled by UN

By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

For agricultural scientists in developing countries, scientific seclusion soon will give way to inclusion, thanks to an online system developed at Cornell's Albert R. Mann Library for the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The system, announced Tuesday, Oct. 14, at FAO headquarters in Rome, is the second major online portal for scientific literature aimed exclusively at the developing world. Called Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA), it will provide scientists in developing nations free access to more than 400 journals in agriculture and related sciences. The Rockefeller Foundation and other donor agencies fund the project, and scientific publishers provide the content for free.

"Developing countries need access to current scientific literature in order to advance in a fast-paced, knowledge-intensive research environment, but they are often shut out of the competition by the high cost of journal subscriptions," said Cornell President Jeffrey Lehman in a statement read at the Rome project launch. "I am delighted that Cornell, through the Mann Library, and with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the world's leading scientific publishers, has addressed this problem head-on through AGORA."

Librarians and computing experts from Cornell's Mann Library worked with publishers and the FAO to assemble AGORA, selecting the journals, developing authentication solutions and resolving technical problems. The FAO will be responsible for management and maintenance of all functions of the AGORA Web site, with additional support coming from Cornell and the World Health Organization (WHO). Mann librarians will assist with outreach, training and reference questions, says AGORA project manager Mary Ochs, head of the library's collection development and preservation.

She notes that the new site will offer developing-world researchers, policymakers, educators, students, technical workers and extension specialists a scientific literature collection comparable to that available to scientists in the industrialized world.

According to the FAO, many agricultural libraries in developing countries have not received scientific journals for more than a decade, as collections have disintegrated due to economic and political havoc and war. Without access to current information, scientists in developing countries struggle to keep up with advances, making publishing their own work in scholarly journals a struggle.

AGORA's founding publishers are Blackwell Publishing, CABI Publishing, Elsevier, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Springer-Verlag and John Wiley & Sons.

Scientists and educators in the developing world now have two low-cost options for entering the information age, said Lehman. Since 1999, many of them have been subscribing to Mann Library's The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library (TEEAL), a CD-ROM "library in a box" of recent journals in agriculture and the life sciences.

The AGORA Web site borrows design elements from TEEAL and from the HINARI portal for medical journals, started by the WHO two years ago. The new site consists of an indexed database for searching AGORA's content linked to a gateway providing access to full-text journal articles.

The new project will be discussed on campus by Robert Herdt, Cornell adjunct professor of applied economics and management, in a talk, "AGORA: A Digital Library for Sustainable Agriculture in the Developing World," Thursday, Oct. 23, at 4 p.m., on the second floor of the Mann Library addition.