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Workshop report for 15th AERO conference Oct 19-22nd, 2005
National Agricultural Library
Oct 19th , Wednesday AERO members arrived from throughout the country.
Oct 20th, Thursday was spent entirely at the USDA South Building in Washington D.C.
Session 1: Overview and tour of Foreign Agricultural Service, Production Estimates & Crop Assessment Division’s (PECAD) remote Sensing facility by Robert Tetrault, Senior Analyst and Manager, Satellite Imagery Archives http://www.fas.usda.gov/pecad/remote.html
The mission of PECAD is to target, collect, analyze, and disseminate timely, objective, useful, and cost-effective global crop condition and agricultural production information. The division's commodity estimates and forecasts inform U.S. commodity producers of world markets, and contribute to an international pricing mechanism for commodities. This data is released through a “lockup” procedure each month.
PECAD brings together remote sensing specialists, agricultural economists, plant pathologists, and hydrology experts to comprise the only operational satellite remote sensing team of its type in the world. This team uses geospatial information technologies to analyze global agricultural production and crop conditions.
FAS uses information collected by PECAD to track world commodity supplies to find market opportunities for US commodities. For example, if Brazil buys less wheat from Argentina one year due to a smaller crop, there is a market opportunity for US Wheat.
Prices are determined by the market, however, FAS provides information to the markets so the best price can be discovered.
PECAD has archived data back to 1979. They use remote sensing and data from a variety of sources such as NOA, NASA and the US Air Force to estimate worldwide crops. We saw several samples of infared satellite photos showing the density and thus health of various crops.
FAS produces “Attache” or Commodity Intelligence reports that forecast various commodities’ supplies in different regions of the world. http://www.pecad.fas.usda.gov/index.cfm
One way to find these reports is by searching “attache” on the FAS web site.
Presentation on Foreign Agricultural Service's Agricultural Attaché program -- http://www.fas.usda.gov/faa/faa.htm
Session 2: Presentation on Foreign Agricultural Service's Agricultural Attaché program -- http://www.fas.usda.gov/faa/faa.htm
FAS is one of 5 foreign affairs agencies in the executive branch. FAS has the primary responsibility for USDA’s international activities—market development, trade agreements and negotiations, and the collection and analysis of statistics and market information. FAS publishes Market and Trade Reports, http://www.fas.usda.gov/currwmt.asp. FAS has 6 program areas Market Development, Commercial Export Financing, Import Programs, International Development, Trade Adjustment Assistance, Food Aid.
Session 3: National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) Lockup procedure for production forecast reports --http://www.usda.gov/nass/nassinfo/reports.htm
NASS employees took us through a mock Lockup procedure. These procedures are in place to protect the confidentiality of the US & Foreign commodity data. They were established after an insider trading scandal in 1905. This data is based on farmer surveys, objective yield program (physically measuring crops), administrative data such as slaughter statistics. There are NASS offices in each state that contribute data. Anyone can contact their local NASS office with statistical questions. NASS employees are locked up together from 10:30pm to 8:30am once a month to analyze commodity data and produce the reports. Journalists from Reuters, Bloomberg and other news agencies are locked into the “Media Room” where they await the release of the data then immediately write their reports and send them electronically for publication. AERO members saw the media room, printing room and briefing room.
We viewed a video about NASS ‘s mission. NASS publishes over 400 reports a year as well as the Census of Agriculture. NASS plans on the 2007 Census of Ag being the last one to be published in print. AERO plans to send a letter to NASS asking that they petition to get the Census of Ag onto GPO’s essential titles list as the other economic censuses are, to continue its publication and distribution in print.
Session 4: Agricultural Marketing Service's (AMS) National Organic Program -- http://www.ams.usda.gov/nop/indexIE.htm, Keith Jones
The USDA’s National Organic Program began in 1990 with provisions in the Farm Bill, the Organic Foods Product Act. By 1997 a USDA certification process for organic food was established. USDA sees it as a marketing program in a growing niche market. In reaction to citizen feedback, the first definition of organic has gone through revisions and in Dec 2000 USDA published new rule. The USDA organic seal is becoming the most widely recognized organic seal. USDA has established equivalents with international trading partners to assure that imported organic products are meeting the same standards. So some imported products have the USDA seal.
There are still issues and tensions within the standards. Often these are between organic rules and public health for example: containing the spread of Avian Flu while maintaining organic free range standards. USDA is in the process of developing organic standards for aquaculture, cosmetics and pet food.
Session 5: Agricultural Marketing Service's (AMS) Fruit & Vegetable Programs -- http://www.ams.usda.gov/fv/ Charles Parrot
Charles Parrot from the AMS spoke with us describing the AMS programs, particularly the Fruit and Vegetable Programs. The Agricultural Marketing Service includes six commodity programs--Cotton, Dairy, Fruit and Vegetable, Livestock and Seed, Poultry, and Tobacco. The programs provide standardization, grading and market news services for those commodities. There are 185 grades for fresh produce and 154 grades for processed foods. They enforce such Federal Laws as the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act and the Federal Seed Act.
There are three other programs Science & Technology, Transportation and Marketing and Civil Rights. AMS also administers the School Lunch program, purchasing all food for it from domestic producers.
Presently, there are 34 active marketing agreement and order programs, which collect assessment fees from handlers to cover operation and administrative costs of the programs, and an additional program for peanuts. Marketing orders and marketing agreements are designed to help stabilize market conditions for fruit and vegetable products. The programs assist farmers in allowing them to collectively work to solve marketing problems. Industries voluntarily enter into these programs and choose to have Federal oversight of certain aspects of their operations. A marketing order is a legal instrument authorized by the U.S. Congress through the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937. Marketing agreements are voluntary while marketing orders are mandatory.
The new Fruit & Vegetable Market News Portal (FVMN) http://marketnews.usda.gov/portal/fv became available on the web in October 2005. Plans are to publish and archive all FVMN reports here.
Since 1915, Fruit and Vegetable Market News reports have provided an exchange of information among growers, shippers, wholesalers, and others on current supplies, demand, and prices of over 400 fresh fruit, vegetable, nut, ornamental, and other specialty crops. Because of the perishable and seasonal nature of fresh fruits and vegetables, prices and supplies fluctuate rapidly making fast, timely and impartial reporting of supply, price, and market conditions important to an efficient marketing system.
AMS also administers the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act (PACA) which prohibits unfair and fraudulent practices and provides a means of enforcing contracts. Under the PACA, anyone buying or selling commercial quantities of fruit and vegetables must be licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Friday October 21, National Agricultural Library http://www.nal.usda.gov/
Session 1: Welcome & Short Overview/Update of NAL by Maria Pisa, NAL Associate Director for Public Services
NAL’s vision is to “advance access to global information for agriculture” and to have as much of this information as possible available to users at their desktops. NAL has 171 Federal staff and 85 non-Federal Staff and their 2005 budget was $22.4 million. 78,000 items were delivered to desktops electronically from NAL last year and there were over 16,000 in depth reference transactions.
Session 2: AGRICOLA & AGRICOLA Rescoping Update -- Chris Cole (NAL Associate Director of Technical Services)
Chris spoke to us about plans to rescope Agricola to move away from the journal indexing function and focus on producing a unique database that fills a niche in the market. NAL is seeking input from AERO, USAIN and other interested parties to find out which sorts of publications they would like to see indexed. Suggestions included: Ag Experiment Station publications, Cooperative Extension publications, trade journals, local farm newspapers, local professional associations, Agricultural Commissioner Reports, web resources.
The Agricola search interface will be the front door search mechanism for an electronic repository of primarily government agricultural information. The goal is to serve as a live repository for all USDA sponsored research, including that published in scholarly journals. Regarding copyright, Chris pointed out that section 105 of the Copyright Act states that if an author is a USDA employee, the publication is in the public domain, even if it has been published in a scholarly journal.
Long term archiving of electronic materials is still being worked out, but NAL plans to have mirror sites to set up redundancy in the system. NAL is working towards becoming a National Digital Library for Agriculture, similar to the vision of the National Institutes of Health. An advisory council is being formed to get this project going.
On Dec 1st , 2005, there will be a new version of the NAL website to make it conform to the USDA web style. This should make it easier to access information in a standard way.
Session 3: Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC) Update http://www.agnic.org/ -- Melanie Gardner, AgNIC Coordinator National Agricultural Library
AgNIC is a voluntary partnership that began in 1995 with 57 collaborating partners at land grant universities throughout the United States. These partners are each assigned an agricultural topic on which they collect information and contribute it to AgNIC. AgNIC partners meet in the spring each year at the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland and there is an AgNIC listserv. AgNIC is working on adding more fulltext of grey literature in Agriculture. Melanie distributed a list of current AgNIC partners and their subject areas.
Session 4: AgEcon Search Update http://agecon.lib.umn.edu/ (Survey Results and Efforts Towards Internationalization) -- Louise Letnes, University of Minnesota, Applied Economics Library
AgEcon search continues to grow in content and use. There are currently over 18,000 fulltext working papers there and they have had over 1 million downloads since 2001. The past three years of ERS documents have also been recently added and there are currently 16 journals available in fulltext on AgEcon Search. Contributors include over 120 universities, government and scholarly associations worldwide. Louise distributed lists of contributors and the journal titles.
AgEcon Search is migrating to Dspace software in Dec 2006. This will enhance search functions and automate harvesting papers from other web sites. The fields in the database will be remapped to Dublin core standards. Google and Repec will be able to search AgEcon search once they are using Dspace.
Louise and Julie Kelly attend conferences such as the European Agricultural Economics Association conference, the American Agricultural Economics Association, ACRL and USAIN to promote Ag Econ Search.
This year, Julie conducted a survey of AgEcon Search users to find out how they use it and for what purpose. She received 134 responses; most users used it for research and about ½ of users were international.
This year, AAEA gave a $5,000 grant to AgEcon search to add content to the database to make it more comprehensive. Louise and Julie are working on getting permission to harvest working papers from other universities’ web sites; they have 66 potential contributors at this time. They are seeking other possible funding sources such as the NEH.
Efforts towards internationalization of the content continue. The International Agricultural Economics Association is a contributor as well as the FAO, and the European Agricultural Economics Association. They are working with the Australian Agricultural Economics Association to publish two journals in AgEcon Search rather than using Blackwell.
Session 5: Economic Research Service (ERS) Update http://www.ers.usda.gov/ -- Marilynn Graham
The Economic Research Service (ERS) is the main source of economic information and research from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In the early 2005, ERS created a new series for its publications, the intent being that published ERS research would appear in just one or two series instead of the plethora of series used in the past.
No longer are ERS pubs called by their former initials that have become so familiar to us over so many decades: AER, AIBS, MPs, SBs FANRRs, TBs etc…ERS is now using the following series for its research reports: the Economic Information Bulletins, Economic Research Reports and Economic Briefs. The creation of the new series does not affect most outlook reports.
Amber Waves
Earlier this year, the Amber Waves e-Zane was judged to be the Best Electronic Publication produced by a local, State, or Federal government entity by the National Association of Government Communicators, beating out finalists from the Peace Corps, the U.S. Mint, and the State of Vermont.
All publications are available on the ERS website. The ERS Reference Center www.referencecenter@ers.usda.gov is the repository for paper publications of ERS.
Session 6: American Agricultural Economics Association/Economics, Statistics & Information Resources Committee (AAEA/ESIRC) Update http://www.aaea.org/sections/committees/esirc.cfm -- Barbara Hegenbart, UC Davis ARE Library
Barbara is AERO’s representative to the Economics, Statistics and Information Resources Committee. Since the last AERO conference, she attended the 2004 AAEA conference in Denver, CO and the 2005 AAEA conference in Providence, RI. The next AAEA conference will be in Long Beach, CA.
In 2004, Barry Goodwin was the chair of ESIRC. ESIRC held a preconference on microdata prior to the AAEA conference which was attended by 70-80 people.
The new chair of ESIRC is Mary Ahearn. ESRIC members are working on a proposal for a preconference on statistical issues in analyzing data with complex sample designs.
Barbara and Louise met with Mary Ahearn to talk about AAEA publications and to share some information about the digitization project at Mann Library, Cornell. AAEA feels that its contracts with JSTOR and Blackwell preclude putting their publications in Ag Econ Search at this time.
AERO will try to get a rep on the AAEA Communications/Publications committee. Barbara Hegenbart said she would be willing to serve in this capacity.
Mary Ahearn would like to see ESIRC have more of a presence in the AAEA newsletter. She suggested AERO members might submit short articles about Ag Econ resources for the newsletter. We agreed that this would be a good idea and also raise AERO’s presence in AAEA.
Session 7: U.S. Agricultural Information Network (USAIN) Update http://usain.org/ -- Luti Salisbury, University of Arkansas, USAIN President
The last USAIN conference was in Kentucky with 31 major speakers and 40 presentations. The next conference will be at Cornell in Oct 2006.
USAIN has signed a new 5 year agreement with AgNIC. Other activities include having a representative on advisory council to create a National Science Digital Library and seeking NEH funding for preserving historical agricultural information, digitizing print and fiche materials from 1820-1945.
USAIN is participating in a national task force to study how to make a sustainable Agricultural Information system, chaired by Barbara Hutchinson from University of Arizona. This task force plans to produce a white paper on Agricultural Information Contributions to Society and apply for a grant with the goal of creating a National Information Infrastructure for Agriculture. Barbara Hutchinson will also attend the FAO conference to learn about efforts to create an international agricultural information system.
Session 8: Is Google Scholar the Academic Librarian of Tomorrow? http://scholar.google.com/ -- Luti Salisbury & Margaret Merrill
Luti showed us the results of her research on how useful Google Scholar is as a tool for Ag Econ researchers. She concluded that though Google Scholar was still in beta version and was not comprehensive, it was a useful tool that Ag Econ Scholars were comfortable using. She compared coverage of Ag Econ research in Web of Science to that of Google Scholar by searching affiliations of the authors. Surprisingly, Google Scholar compared fairly well to Web of Science, Econlit and CABI in indexing the journal literature. She also noted that holdings information of libraries can be linked within Google Scholar.
Margaret gave us an overview of the current content & methodologies of Google Scholar and discussed its shortcomings. For example it is currently a static database that no one really knows the content of, it has an unsophisticated search interface with no subject headings or sorting capabilities and the links within it often lead users to a pay per view site even when their library has subscribed to the journal title. Her conclusion was that this tool is useful for those who do not have subscriptions to higher quality databases such as Web of Science, but many questions remain and we don’t know if Google plans to start charging for this service at a later date. Margaret mentioned that she recommends using Clusty http://clusty.com/ as a search engine.
Session 9: United Farm Workers [http://www.ufw.org/] Contract Project - Barbara Hegenbart
Barbara discussed a current digitization project of contracts between the United Farm Workers Union AFL-CIO and California growers spanning about 30 years. The project is collaboration between the UC Davis, Digital Initiatives program and the Agricultural and Resource Economics Library. The contracts are available in three digital formats html, pdf and xml.
The process consists of scanning the materials and doing optical character recognition on them and proof reading them. They are then coded in xml and again proofed before the html version is created with a conversion program. Each contract is then cataloged. The cataloging records are sent to Harvest (the UCD Library Catalog), Melvyl (the UC union catalog), and OCLC. The hardware & software is provided by the UC Davis main library while the labor is provided by the UC Davis, ARE Library.
Session 10: Government Documents--Coping with, Ideas, & Open Discussion - Susan Garbarino & Barbara Hegenbart
On October 1, 2005, the Government Printing Office’s announced that with the exception of 50 “Essential Titles” they will no longer publish any government documents in print form. See http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fdlp/pubs/estitles.htm for a list of these titles. Currently the only title related to Agriculture on this list is the annual Agricultural Statistics. AERO members discussed what actions we could take to improve this situation and at least get the Ag Census on to the Essential Titles list. We plan to send a letter to NASS and ALA’s Government Documents Roundtable in support of petitioning GPO to add this title to the list. We discussed other Federal Ag govt docs as well, but agreed that the Ag Census was the first priority at this point as some Federal agencies are archiving their own publications, for example the new AMS market news portal http://marketnews.usda.gov/.
Session 11: Update on Copyright – Rebecca Bernthal
Rebecca updated us on developments concerning copyright and distance education. On November 2nd, 2002, the "Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization Act" (the TEACH Act), part of the larger Justice Reauthorization legislation (H.R. 2215), was signed into law by President Bush. TEACH redefines the terms and conditions on which accredited, nonprofit educational institutions throughout the U.S. may use copyright protected materials in distance education-including on websites without permission from the copyright owner and without payment of royalties.
Rebecca showed us a copy of Carrie Russell’s (of ALA's Office for Information Technology Policy) book Complete Copyright: An everyday guide for librarians. Carrie’s message to librarian’s on copyright is “be bold” i.e. when in doubt if you are in compliance with fair use, go ahead and put something up, otherwise the restrictions will close in and become too tight. Copyright law can be interpreted depending on the case.
ALA has created a Copyright Advisory Network http://www.librarycopyright.net/ to answer questions librarians may have about copyright issues.
Session 12: Resource Sharing Session (WWW, other electronic, print) – Janet Wilson, Rebecca Bernthal, & Wayne Olson
AERO members shared their list of electronic and print resources relevant to Ag Econ including a detailed handout listing these resources.
Business meeting at dinner Friday night:
1-We discussed how to divide the travel funds ($3000) given to us this year by the Farm Foundation. We agreed to divide them equally among those AERO members who applied for them. Treasurer, Susan Garbarino will process these requests.
2-As AAEA’s publication Choices will not be put into AgEcon Search we agreed that if any of us had a complete set of these that we should keep them.
3-The next conference will be at UC Davis in Fall 2007. Barbara Hegenbart and Susan Garbarino will host is jointly. Wayne Olson is our new President. We noted that Linda Davis was the AERO historian.