NAL Digital Collections - Building a National Resource
No Access Until
Permanent Link(s)
Collections
Other Titles
Author(s)
Abstract
The National Agricultural Library (NAL) serves as the Nation's library for agricultural information. Its mission is "advancing access to global information for agriculture." As many large institutions have done, NAL began building a digital repository nearly seven years ago. Originally conceived as several separate projects, the multiple sources of digital content have now been unified into a single system. Over the past two years, NAL has worked to redesign, re-engineer, and re-Iaunch what is now the "NAL Digital Collections." The "digital collections" includes multiple types of content: historic, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) peer-reviewed research literature, rare, and special content and external content. A major component of the NAL Digital Collections will be comprised of content created as the outcomes of extramural grants - "U.S. government agencies with annual extramural research expenditures over $100 million make manuscripts of journal articles stemming from research funded by that agency publicly available via the Internet." In addition, the Federal government is moving to include collecting and storing all associated data sets. Currently, NAL Digital Collections is preparing to accept important external collections such as society publications, subject-specific and peer-reviewed collections, and other full-text research publications. Through the AgNIC partnership cooperative agreements, other fulltext content has been identified, digitized and stored. Attend this session and learn more about the new content and access to full-text information on a national scale.