NAL,
University Partner on Information Project
By Len
Carey
January 21, 2004 The U.S. Department of Agriculture's
National Agricultural Library (NAL) has
established a pilot demonstration project with Mississippi State University (MSU) in Starkville that will give MSU
researchers, teachers and students easier and faster access to the latest and
best available information in the agricultural sciences.
NAL director Peter R. Young and MSU president Charles Lee have signed a
cooperative agreement to establish the first-of-its-kind partnership between
the library and a university and to launch the
DigiTop PLUS
Pilot Demonstration Project at MSU.
The collaboration means the MSU community will have licensed access through
the World Wide Web to science-based information on agriculture and related
fields through electronic scientific journals. This service will be integrated
with electronic reference and document delivery services provided by NAL, based
in Beltsville, Md.
In addition to the benefits to MSU, the project will provide NAL an
opportunity to test the feasibility, costs and effectiveness of extending the
digital desktop system to other colleges and universities with programs in
agricultural sciences.
The MSU Digital DeskTop PLUS service is patterned after
DigiTop, NAL's Digital Desktop
Library for USDA, introduced in January 2003. DigiTop provides
USDA employees with access to electronic
newspapers, directories, databases and thousands of full-text journal articles
in agriculture and related sciences.
NAL, the world's foremost agricultural library, is part of the Agricultural
Research Service, USDA's chief scientific research agency.
|