Chronicle Online e-News
Mann Library upgrades ag 'library in a box' for world's poorest countries
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/July08/LanTEAAL.u
pgrade.sl.html
July 9, 2008
By Susan Lang
ssl4@cornell.edu
In about 50 of the world's poorest countries -- from Afghanistan to
Zimbabwe -- Cornell's "library in a box" gives nutritionists,
veterinarians, soil and animal scientists and natural resource
managers, among others, access to 137 top agricultural journals --
with no compact discs to insert, no Internet and no waiting.
Cornell's Mann Library has just issued an upgraded version of the
digital database of journal articles that includes the last 15 years
or so of most journals and such features as advanced searches,
browsing, saving and indexing.
The database, which works on libraries' or universities' local area
networks (LANS) and is called the Essential Electronic Agricultural
Library (LanTEEAL 2.0), is stored on an external hard drive, about
the size of a video cassette.
"Since its launch nine years ago, TEEAL has improved access to
current scientific knowledge in several dozen of the world's poorest
countries," said Olivia Vent, TEEAL outreach coordinator in Mann
Library.
Recently, TEEAL also has helped place nine LanTEEAL 2.0 sets in
universities and ministries in the Kurdistan region of Iraq and 25
more sets throughout Africa, including at the West African Center for
Crop Improvement at the University of Ghana.
Its journals cover agriculture in the broadest sense, from
aquaculture, rural development and food science and nutrition to
microbiology, sustainable agriculture and veterinary medicine.
"The use of LanTEEAL has been overwhelming," said a librarian from
Moi University in Kenya in a survey. "It is used from 8 a.m. to 5
p.m."
"What a difference the TEEAL collection has made for the Bangladesh
Agricultural Research Council library," wrote Craig A. Meisner, an
adjunct Cornell professor from Dhaka, Bangladesh. "Before, the
library was dark and no one was there. Now it is a vibrant library
with so many students waiting to use TEEAL and reading books,
journals, etc."
"Since we introduced TEEAL, we have seen a dramatic increase in the
number and currency of citations in student theses and papers," said
Willis Oluocho-Kosura, a professor of agricultural economics at the
University of Nairobi. "Before, there might be only a couple of
references and badly outdated from the 1980s."
For more information, see <http://www.teeal.org/>.
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