ELECTRONIC LIBRARY IN AGRICULTURE, FORESTRY AND NATURAL RESOURCES FOR DEVELOPED AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES In March 1994, an Electronic Library in Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources was established at Oxford on the local computer network which is accessible from the Internet (e-mail, FTP, Gopher, WWW) and also by UUCP from Developing Countries. The setup consists of a fast 486DX2-66 MHz PC computer with 2.5 gigabytes SCSI drives connected to the university network and by modem to the telephone system. Software is IBM OS2 running UUPC, Telnet, FTP, Gopher and WWW servers. The equipment includes a Philips CDD521 CD-ROM writer, HP optical scanner and video capture facilities. Currently, a limited number of documents have been set up for demonstration purposes and are accessible via the Internet. In addition, the system connects to Colombia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos daily by UUCP. After four months, successful daily electronic data interchange has been effectively demonstrated to operate at reasonable cost. Further remote sites will be added. Persons with Internet access can access the system by FTP at: ifs.plants.ox.ac.uk or by Gopher at: gopher://ifs.plants.ox.ac.uk or by World Wide Web at http://ifs.plants.ox.ac.uk Persons in remote countries wishing to be connected by UUCP should contact the Editors of LRRD. The project so far has been supported by equipment grants from the International Foundation for Science, Stockholm and the Oxford Forestry Institute. Costs of communication are provided by the FAO Regional TCP in Sustainable Agriculture and Forestry for SE Asia and underwritten by the ODA Forestry Research Programme. PROPOSED DEVELOPMENT The objective is to use the equipment described to develop an electronic library on sustainable technologies which will be available for data interchange. This will include electronic journals and technical literature, electronic conferences and particularly the collection of (non-copyright) publications by scanning and/or optical character recognition. The major basis for document development will be the Oxford Foresty Institute Library which contains the western world's major collection of forestry and related literature. This unique resource is freely available and provides a service of response to technical questions (currently) by correspondence. In addition to the accumulation and distribution of literature and abstracts, the OFI provides proactive processing of the literature, including annotated bibliographies, monographs and manuals on specific topics or species; review publications include Tropical Forestry Papers, Occasional Papers, and Conference Proceedings. Staff of the Institute prepare nearly 100 published articles per year and agency or project reports. A further form of information service has been the development and dissemination of computerized databases and their management systems. The objective of the current programme is to translate these major library resources into electronic format and make them available over the network, increasing the worldwide availability of forestry and related literature and data. The project is under the direction of Dr A.W. Speedy, University Lecturer in Plant Sciences who is permanently employed by the University of Oxford and an Associate Member of the Oxford Forestry Institute. Besides forestry, it is intended to include sections on sustainable agriculture, livestock production and natural resources, with the cooperation of other libraries and institutions worldwide. The basic equipment is now established and operational. The need is for additional staff and facilities to begin the tasks of scanning the OFI collection and other relevant literature and to comit this to the electronic system and to CD-ROM for further distribution for local networks. A staff of 3 persons is required and present estimates suggest that this would result in the accumulation of approximately 200 books per man-year or 2000 books (or equivalent) by the team over a 3 year period, eventually completing the target of 2 GB of data available. The establishment of the electronic library production team means that at the end of the project there would be a major resource available worldwide in forestry and natural resources research, development and teaching. . Gopher Link-Info: ----------------- Type=1 Name=Livestock Research for Rural Development Path=.\lrrd\lrrd.70 Host=ifs.plants.ox.ac.uk Port=70 URL: gopher://ifs.plants.ox.ac.uk:70/1.%5clrrd%5clrrd.70