[Sigia-l] dealing with Knowledge Management

[Terry Brainerd Chadwick]

At 02:14 PM 7/12/2002 -0500, Lucie Melahn wrote:
>Sorry to sound so mysterious. Our current client is the USDA
>(specifically, APHIS, the arm that deals with agricultural diseases and
>biosecurity issues). Not the FBI. ;)

Have you tried using Agricola <http://www.nal.usda.gov/ag98/> for keyword 
determination.  Agricola is the USDA Library's database and has been around 
for decades.  It has a very well-known and standardized system for 
classifying agricultural documents.  There are 605 documents that came up 
when I searched on APHIS.

The librarians at the National Agricultural 
Library  <http://www.nal.usda.gov/> can probably give you a lot of 
information about quickly setting up a metadata system for your collection, 
no matter what database program you need to use.

NAL has recently released a Metadata Template which you may find of use.
"NAL Metadata Template
The National Agricultural Library is pleased to announce the availability 
of the NAL Metadata Element Set (www.nal.usda.gov/cataloging/TEMPLATE2.pdf) 
The NAL Metadata Element Set is the official standard for the creation of 
metadata for all digital objects created by NAL, including both original 
documents and digitized versions of publications formerly available only
in print. Based on the Dublin Core, the NAL Metadata Element Set contains 
both descriptive elements and administrative elements. When embedded in a 
digital object, the descriptive elements (title, author, creator, 
publisher, date, summary, etc.) help locate a  resource when these access 
points are used in searches. The administrative elements provide 
information on the stability of the contents of a digital object as well as 
on the object's availability.  Incorporation of metadata elements into 
digital objects will facilitate the retrieval of the objects by search 
engines and Web crawlers. "

Also, check out the Agricola Subject Category Scope Notes 
<http://www.agnic.org/cc/scope_notes.html> that are the codes used by 
National Agricultural Library indexers and catalogers to categorize 
bibliographic records in the AGRICOLA database.

Terry

Terry Brainerd Chadwick, InfoQuest! Information Services
mailto:tbchad at tbchad.com         http://www.tbchad.com
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