Browsing by Subject "agricultural research"

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    Born-digital agricultural resources: archives and issues
    (International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists (IAALD), 2007) Eells, Linda L.
    Agricultural researchers and public users world-wide have ever-increasing access to a plethora of online resources, including "grey literature" not published in commercial or society publications. In the United States, most of the agricultural grey literature is contributed by land grant university Agricultural Experiment Station (AES) and associated Cooperative Extension Service (CES) units. Their publications and resources are often created in a digital format and presented online even when a parallel distribution option is maintained for a print or hard-copy version. While increasing the amount of free online agricultural information is critically important, many issues must be addressed to ensure that users can both easily locate and retain long-term access to this information. It is also imperative to create a user-friendly process that enables researchers, extension agents, and farmers to more easily contribute valuable digital agricultural content to online venues, while at the same time centralizing access points to enable faster, easier access by all users. Most importantly, literature being born-digital1 today must be described and archived in a manner that preserves access for searchers ten, fifty, or one hundred years from now, enabling them to learn from today's lessons rather than repeat them.
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    Participation in a large-scale study to evaluate agricultural research support services
    (2016-09) Kocher, Megan; Farrell, Shannon
    During the spring and summer of 2016, we participated in Ithaka S+R’s Research Support Services program, which “is designed to help libraries re-imagine their services for scholars on a discipline-by-discipline basis.” Ithaka S+R is a not-for-profit organization that partners with academic libraries to help them gather evidence, via surveys and other research methods, to improve library services and strategic planning. Ithaka S+R is currently doing a series of studies to determine researcher support needs in various disciplines, such as religious studies, chemistry, and public health. We participated in their agricultural study, which aimed to learn about agricultural researchers’ research focus, research methods and publishing practices. The data that we collected will be collated with 18 other institutions and will be published in a large report. In this poster, we will share our experiences participating in this large-scale research project, through working with Ithaka S+R, interviewing participants, coding qualitative data, and analyzing results. We will also share our preliminary findings on agriculture scholars at the University of Minnesota.