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Reference Sources and Services

Notes Background and Development of the AGRIS Network

AGRIS has been operational since 1975. It’s main aim is ‘‘to build an information system in the field
of agriculture science and technology and related subjects’’. It is a system of collaborative network
of agricultural institutions of the world. The basic principles on which AGRIS was established as an
agricultural network are given below:
AGRIS is an international/global system that is:
‘‘entirely international in scope as all United Nations Member Countries are participating in
the programme;
multilingual with English as a carrier language;
a centralised collection of bibliographic details of publications, outputs and activities of
agricultural research programmes of various United Nations Member States;
special emphasis is on non - conventional (grey) literature in Member States;
a global system which is participatory as it is based on a designated national AGRIS Input
Centre in each United Nations Member State and other related agricultural international
organisations;
an information system supported by Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) which has
complete coordination with regard to application of tools and methodologies, data processing,
training, and other technical back-up activities; and
a system where all UN Member States have common ownership of agricultural data alongwith
facility of easy access to the collective information base maintained at the AGRIS headquarters.’’
The subject areas of the AGRIS include various aspects of agriculture, including forestry, food,
environment, animal sciences, aquatic sciences and fisheries, human nutrition and all other aspects
related to agricultural sciences from participating countries all over the world. AGRIS centres input
information from periodical literature, monographs, reports, patents, standards, etc., on standardised
data input formats. The covered literature also includes unique material such as unpublished
scientific and technical reports, theses, conference papers, government publications, and more.
Approximately 1,30,000, records are added each year with keywords in English, French, and Spanish.
The centralised processing is then done at the AGRIS Coordinating Centre in Rome.

The AGRIS information system has till date a total of 242 participating centres
located in various United Nations Member States.
Each AGRIS National Centre acts as a focal point in the concerned country or region which makes
available information to the user community thereby acting as a decentralised system. Some of the
centres are carrying out not only the documentation of scientific and technical literature, but are
also working for the development of agricultural information management.
In the last three decades, AGRIS has been quite successful in achieving its initially stated goals, but
there have been some problems faced by the participating centres which at times hamper overall
progress of the network. Some of these problems are:
1. Access to the original documents. All AGRIS records comprise bibliographic reference.
The abstract is usually available for only about 30% of AGRIS records. The access to the
full-text of the documents, however, is only possible through document delivery (for
example, by post or fax). Therefore, most developing countries have not been able to offer
this service properly and this leads to a lot of problems.

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