100 years forest information at Oxford

Between 5 and 7 December 2005, the Oxford Forest Information Service celebrated its centenary. Some 50 people met in Oxford to explore frontiers in forest information, discussing global needs for forest-related information, forest information for development, new publishing paradigms, and the impact of changing technologies. The presentations as well as the conclusions and proposals emanating from conference will be disseminated by the organizers in the near future.

Introducing the OFIS centenary, Roger Mills, Manager of the Service, shared some highlights of the past 100 years including its origin as a School of Forestry, associations with the Imperial (later Commonwealth then Oxford) Forestry Institute and the Imperial Forestry Bureau (later Commonwealth then CAB) and close partnership with IUFRO – the International Union of Forest Research Organizations. Today, the Service is housed in Oxford University’s Department of Plant Sciences and is an integral part of the Oxford University Library Service.

Over the years, the Service produced a monthly index of forestry literature (evolving into Forestry Abstracts and www.ForestScience.info), contributed to work on forestry terminology and classification schemes (the Oxford Decimal Classification for Forestry), microfilmed (and now is digitizing) important archival documents, is partner in the CABI Forestry Compendium project and the AgriFor gateway, and contributed to the establishment of the Global Forest Information Service. In 2005, OFIS launched the Oxford Digital Library for Forestry and is actively involved in the Global Forest Decimal Classification - that replaces the Oxford classification – as well as IUFRO special interest groups of forest information.

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Tags: agricultural information forestry