Belarus Agricultural Library becomes FAO depository

Minsk, 4 October. Representatives of the FAO, the United Nations Office in Belarus, the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Ministry of Agriculture and Food of the Republic of Belarus, managers of agricultural research centres and institutes of higher education, and directors of leading Belarusian libraries took part in an official presentation to mark the Belarus Agricultural Library's (BelAL) accession to the network of FAO deposit libraries.

In July this year the Belarus Agricultural Library (BelAL) became an official Depository Library of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The system of FAO depository libraries dealing with collection, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of information about nutrition, food and agriculture has been established to make FAO materials and publications available to the public of member countries. There are already more than 300 depositories around the world.

FAO documents (in English) covering food-related issues, agriculture, forestry, fishery, agricultural economy, veterinary and statistics are now available in the Belarus Agricultural Library.

At the presentation, participants heard reports by the leading specialists of the Library on:

• BelAL as the FAO Depository Library in Belarus
• AgroWeb Belarus in the AgroWeb Central and Eastern Europe Network
• AGRIS/CARIS - International Information System for Agricultural Sciences and Technology / International Information System on Agricultural Research Projects
• AGLINET ­ International Document Delivery Project

It was underlined that the Library maintains and updates over 40 bibliographic, reference, factual and full-text databases containing more than 20 million bibliographic references and millions of pages of full texts. Its collection of agricultural literature consists of over half a million documents in Russian, Belarusian, English, Polish and other languages. BelAL is the National Center of the FAO International Information System for the agricultural sciences and technology (AGRIS). BelAL is also a member of the FAO Current Agricultural Research Information System, known as CARIS, and provides information about Belarusian research projects. Being a member of the FAO Agricultural Libraries Network (AGLINET), BelAL can receive documents from many national agricultural libraries around the world. In accordance with the FAO principle of free access to information, resources of the FAO Depository Library and the main Library stock are available for visitors of the Library as well as via the Internet (http://www.belal.by/).

More on: BelAL; AGRIS; AGLINET; Agroweb Belarus

Story contributed by Marina Khomenko
Tags: agricultural information belarus fao