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Unit 12: Some Important Information Centers

2. Incomplete coverage. In the last few years, a review of the input statistics of literature Notes
received from Asia/Pacific region, Africa and Latin American/Caribbean regions to the
central AGRIS database shows slight decline in the number of records input to the database.
This has been in contrast to the statistics gathered from other sources that show a fast
upward trend of global production of documentation and other outputs related to
agricultural development and food security which too is a cause for alarm.
3. Agriculture related systems other than AGRIS. As per a chief objective of AGRIS, its
database receives all inputs from the United Nations Member States only. But many national
bibliographic databases, and even collections of electronic full-text documents pertinent
to the scope of AGRIS, exist outside the framework of AGRIS, and thus have no involvement
with FAO.
4. Lack of structural and institutional linkages. The overall setup lacks network linkages
due to structural and institutional barriers. Thus the existing AGRIS system lacks proper
coverage due to its centres not being linked in any significant way to the wider community
of organisations and programmes working in food security or rural development.
Since its inception, the chief objective of AGRIS has been capacity building, improving access and
exchange of information in the area of agricultural science and technology. Besides this, the system
also aims to review the present day available technologies and user requirements for the future of
development of the AGRIS. Presently, the strengthening of the AGRIS initiative has gone far beyond
the creation and development of bibliographical databases. The focus has always been to improve
accessibility of science and technology information to facilitate agricultural development and food
security. AGRIS plays vital role in highlighting the need and importance of agriculture and
information related to agricultural activities in the developing and developed countries thereby
indicating that agriculture can be a central part of the developments in these nations. Although this
effort is entirely based on the awareness and goodwill of the international community, AGRIS can
lead to improving electronic publishing of documentation in agricultural science and technology,
linking information about institutions, scientists and researchers, and activities, without too much
of efforts and thus leading to a collaborative framework.
With the above in view, the AGRIS has revised its principles in collaboration with the Member
Countries for the AGRIS network to achieve its objective in the near future. The revised principles
take into account the aspects related to adopting a decentralised approach, more emphasis on national
partnerships, improved linkages, capacity building, making available full-text of documents in the
field of agriculture science and technology, web-enabled methodologies and tools and need for
establishment of standards.

AGRIS Network and AGRIS Resource Centres

Efforts are on to improve the activities of AGRIS Resource Centres and thus improve the capabilities
of the AGRIS Network. With this in view, a high level committee was set up in June 2000, which
recommended that AGRIS Input Centres be renamed as AGRIS Resource Centres in order to
reflect their revised role. These centres just like the input centres, are recommended to be located
in various national, regional or international organisations. The Resource Centres are expected to
play a key role in capacity building with focus on national and regional partnership. The
international network on the other hand would lead to exchange of agricultural information and
knowledge with help of the modern available tools and technologies. Some of the functions that
are essential for the AGRIS Resource Centres are:
‘‘adoption and implementation of standards for catalogueing and indexing agricultural
information, especially the categorisations schemes, thesauri and the development of standard
exchange formats;

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