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Saturday, April 20
Early bird session Saturday evening. Informal meeting allowed
new members to ask questions and get guidance from long time members.
Sunday, April 21
Free day. Dinner on Sunday evening at Pauline Sondag's
(former AERO member and MSU librarian) home. We spent the day
touring campus and East Lansing.
Monday, April 22, Kellogg Center, MSU
WELCOME
Judi Dow, meeting
organizer, welcomed us to MSU. Carole Armstrong, acting
director MSU Libraries, Larry Hamm, Chair of Ag.
Econ. welcomed us to the campus. He stressed the role of reference
services to all the faculty, etc. of ag. econ. We are on the cutting
edge in reference access and dissemination. It is challenging
to keep up with the fast-breaking changes in electronic media.
EXCELLENCE AT MSU
Country Life Historic Park. Dr. Julie Avery - MSU Museum. 80,000 people visit this historical picture of what agriculture heritage in Michigan is/was. It speaks to the agricultural way of life. The park is an historical agricultural community. The park reacquaints people with our agricultural heritage to today's issues of groundwater contamination, etc.
Turfgrass Information Center. Pete Cookingham. TGIFile. The turf industry is not a highly known area of study. The demand is non-consumptive agriculture. Discretionary funds go to this sector. There is no government funding. It is a state-level effort - any federal connection is not significant. It is very difficult to find data on this subject. Acreage nationally is close to the area of the state of Pennsylvania. There is a collection of sources on turf at MSU (Turfgrass Bibliography 1672-1972, James B. Beard, et al.) is the "bible" in this field. Texas A&M has the rest of the "good" data on turf. The Turfgrass Info. Center is a small shop at MSU, but the data is primary data for the entire industry.
Information Access Center. Amy Blair - Head of Science Reference at MSU. Library Outreach Services and Science Access Center. There are 6 outreach areas in MI. The funding is from Michigan Extension Service. Where do extension people get the answers they need? Issues programming in MI - Economy, Families and the Environment are the areas of interest. Counties contact the center via e-mail, 800 number, etc. with requests. The center has been in existence for 3 years and has proved very successful and heavily used by the outlying people of the state.
International Documents. Debbi Schaubman. The UN holdings are very strong - Development and Environment holding are strong. UNESCO depositories. FAO collections are strong. European Union depository. Environmental economics is becoming a strong need and force. Asian Development Bank. The OAS data is available only in Spanish. Inter-American Development Bank materials. OECD has been doing much environmental work in the past few years. This data is heavily used. Unusual data at MSU. FAO fiche collection (2,000/year). AGRIS database has helped the use of the FAO data to increase. This is important data. OECD Working Papers (150 title/year) - marketing and trade. Organization Economic Cooperation and Development (western, industrialized nations).
GPO Access web site. Cynthia Teague - Federal Documents Librarian. Congress is pushing for an electronic document program. Five-year transition to 50% electronic. 30,000 publications in electronic format within five years. The early, main focus was on providing data to Congress.
World Wide Web Addresses:
http://www.access.gpo.gov
(many of the GPO stats are at this address). This is an excellent
source of data with access from ANYWHERE.
http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/usda.html (NASS, ERS, WAOB reports and data). It's easy to use this from our familiarity with the publications.
http://www.econ.ag.gov The ERS web site
http://www.vcilp.org/Fed-Agency/fedwebloc.html The Federal Web Locator at the Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy
Storage: Where is all this web hoopla going? Download while the data is still on the web because it might disappear. Archiving is becoming more of an issue. It is important to save the data sets you have now because they may not appear at a later time. US Census of Agriculture might be leaving Census - it may be transferred to Agriculture from Commerce. There will be Census but no one knows where it will come from. The format and the question structure will be the same. The 1997 Census will go ahead as before since it is so far along. NASS will not be involved in 1997. NASS doesn't have the authority that Census does to require answering (big firms would rather pay the fine than do the questionnaire).
BASIC REFERENCE SOURCES:
Grace Dote - UC Berkeley.
http://are.berkeley.edu/ and http://are.berkeley.edu/gf/library Bibliographies: Handout data. Much of the data is now available on CD ROM, but historical data is not. On-line data: AGRICOLA (ISIS), CIA Fact Book http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html ,and the Handbook/Directories of Members of AAEA http://unr.edu:80/homepage/davel/
ERS UPDATE
Good news and "great news." The changes at ERS. There is now a permanent administrator. Five divisions are now in place with no "acting" people. ERS is doing more with less resources; it has been difficult but it has forced all of us to use the electronic media more efficiently. The publications changes. Some are available only on electronic (crop outlook reports). We can expect more timely outlooks but less available on paper. Research publication changes. Publications that are related to the ongoing programs only. This is the real change from the past where many things were published that had small or no audience. We can expect better and more data from the core areas of ERS. We can expect more graphics and color. Staff Paper Series - limited distribution. Abstract and summaries will be on AgEcon Search very soon. Electronic Dissemination - Mann Library (Cornell), ERS, NASS, World Outlook Board. Within 3 hours of release, the data are uploaded. Courier 12 pt is the only font which will work with these reports. www.econ.ers.gov (ERS homepage) Agricultural Outlook (1990/1996 Farm Bill comparison) available now. Customizing output will be more and more prevalent because of the huge amount of data available. The consumer of data is overwhelmed.
Publication Distribution Program - ERS will have a customized approach which will look at each customer and user and his/her particular needs and problems. Automated FAX is the most efficient and inexpensive way of supplying data. The Economic Indicators for the Farm Sector is no longer a series published. The Economic Indicators of the Farm Sector is being replaced by the Farm Business Economic Indicators (FBEI) - a once a year publication.
SHARING PRINT REFERENCES: This session is extremely valuable to all of us. Most of us think that this session is the best session at each conference.
Tuesday, April 23, Agriculture Hall, MSU AgEcon SEARCH: RESEARCH IN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS Louise Letnes, Eric Biever - University of Minnesota.
History of the project: Three years ago Louise and Pat Rodkewich began collection working paper series and wanted to put them in electronic form. The idea of putting all of the ag econ working papers in ONE PLACE was the ultimate dream. So, they began looking for funding to do this. Applied to AAEA for funding, but this didn't happen. Eventually, Farm Foundation and ERS agreed to help with the funding. U of M at St Paul agreed to allow the project to use the server. All met, Louise, Pat, Eric Biever, Jack Solok, etc. and decided to go for it. AAEA supported the project, so all of the players were in place. U of M, Ag Econ Library of U of M, ERS, and Farm Foundation. Guidelines: All papers submitted must be part of a Working Paper series; random papers will not be accepted. Searching: Truncation (*). Searching the abstract is the first option when entering the citation. In order to look at the paper, Acrobat (Acroread) software must be installed on the receiving end. Acrobat is able to accommodate equations. There will be boolean logic installed soon. Browsing function: Each state will have a stand-alone page so that it can be added to the university's homepage. ERS will have abstracts on the system. How to submit papers: Each submitting school should have only one or two people submitting all of the works to eliminate problems for the U of M. The paper must be submitted in two parts - the paper and the bibliographic part. Sending: It must be sent as an ASCII file. It must be sent as a postscript file so that any user can use it. The document must have a postscript printer option so that the U of M can use it. Ask the computer support person to install a printer (postscript) in the printer control so that it can be transferred to Minnesota. The Abstract is sent to Louise where she enters the bibliographic record into AgEcon Search. This is important since this is what is searched by the user. The submissions instructions are now on the system; this will make it easier for all of us to use.
FirstSearch: Luti Salisbury - University of Arkansas. FirstSearch is a vendor (59 databases). It is linked to libraries holdings. Interlibrary loan is part of FirstSearch service. What does it do: Full text online; downloading $2.50/article (same price for viewing); enhances reference services; available on telnet and WWW; user searching; Boolean operators for advanced searching, can use "or" only twice. Can control what your system will do. Very affordable but there are pricing options. To save money, it is important to search intelligently. There are many agecon databases plus general reference databases. Demonstration: This is a very powerful and comprehensive searching tool.
CREATING YOUR OWN HOME PAGE ON THE WEB:
Linda Davis - University of Wisconsin, Ellen Reneke - Clemson
University, Sandy Sears - Oregon State University. Your web page
should have only info that shows what you have to offer. Identify
your target audience. Survey them to find out who they are and
what they need from your page. Make sure your clientele has hardware
to use your services. Are you able to provide the info and in
the proper and usable format? It is very important to have your
plans made BEFORE you develop your web page. Don't do it at all
unless you are going to keep it updated, current and your data
"hot." Plan! Plan! Plan! The web can be a tangled web
if it is not planned correctly. Consistent headings, icons, graphics
are very important.
The Homepage is the most important page. The homepage is the entry point of your site - you see it first but don't necessarily want to stay there. There should be uniformity within universities. The willy-nilly setting up of these sites is bringing chaos to the scene. Use artistic sense when designing page. The colors and content of the graphics determine how fast it is to load, etc. Keep the pages short, use graphics sparingly (time to load). The ag econ users are predominantly interested in data. Check it over and over from your site and other sites and hardware to see if it actually works. Just because it works for you doesn't guarantee that it will work from other sites. You can learn to edit yourself or contact local html editors and helpers. Microsoft Word has an html function in the word processing package which does the work for you. Html is a simple program which controls the display of the information on your page. It is similar to using WordPerfect with the Reveal Codes screen turned on.
SHARING ELECTRONIC RESOURCES: AERO members shared favorite electronic resources.
Meeting Adjourned at 2:30 p.m.
Reported by Sue Anderson
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