On the return of Unasylva
The information explosion and AGRIS forestry
With this issue, after an absence of two years, Unasylva resumes regular publication. We have our readers to thank for this.
Soon after it was announced that FAO was suspending Unasylva for economy reasons, letters and statements began to arrive urging that this decision be reversed and the magazine brought back. To these messages were added the important support of leaders of national forest services during the Seventh World Forestry Congress in Buenos Aires and the First Session of the FAO Committee on Forestry in Rome in 1972. To bring Unasylva back to life, however, required the formal approval of FAO's Member Governments. This was forthcoming at the FAO Conference of November 1973, where the necessary funds were appropriated.
The resumption of Unasylva is also due to Leslie J. Vernell, who was its editor since its second issue in 1948 and who retired last year. He, more than anyone else, made it a solid, respected and useful journal, and brought it a faithful following. He remains its editor emeritus.
In resuming publication Unasylva's aim is to continue bringing its readers the kind of authoritative articles and information which are useful today and still worthy of being read years later in the forestry collections of libraries throughout the world. This has been Unasylva's strong point since it was founded 27 years ago. We will attempt to make it stronger.
If a magazine expects to be stimulating and pertinent, it should take account of the opinions of its readers. We look forward to having yours about anything we publish.
To those who have been inconvenienced or in doubt about its status, during the time Unasylva did not appear, we apologize. And to all those who helped bring Unasylva back, we send thanks for the opportunity to continue serving international forestry and forest industries.
T.M.P.
It is estimated that the literature of agriculture - including forestry, fisheries and nutrition - is currently growing at a rate of 250 000 items a year. To help come to grips with this information explosion, FAO was charged by its Member Governments with designing and coordinating a system which would make current documentation in various disciplines of applied agriculture rapidly and economically accessible to research workers anywhere in the world.
The system is called AGRIS, for International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Technology. Its first stage, AGRIS (Level One), is well advanced, and includes an AGRINDEX, just published in an experimental form and scheduled to go into regular periodical publication in 1975. This is a current bibliography which lists the latest agricultural literature in broad categories for quick reference.
It is necessary now for FAO to identify future users and collaborators for the more specialized AGRIS (Level Two), which is to consist of networks of documentation centres, each devoted to a specific field of agriculture.
Forestry has been designated among the first applied sciences to have such a network of documentation centres.¹ Of the 250 000 new items of agricultural documentation appearing annually, 6 to 8 percent, or 15 000 to 20 000, concern forestry, including silviculture, forest management, harvesting and transport, forest industries, pulp and paper, conservation and wildlife. These are books, technical reports, papers and articles which originate in government agencies, universities, institutes, the private sector, professional journals and the trade press.
¹ Other applied sciences initially designated for AGRIS documentation centre networks include tropical agriculture, veterinary medicine and an animal feed information service.
The AGRIS Forestry network will be built around a central computerized data bank linked with a number of large forestry documentation centres using computers. Each of these, in turn, will be linked to any number of smaller local information centres, some of which also employ computers. FAO will soon make contact with a number of well-established forestry documentation centres to arrange the terms under which they may become part of the network.
Clients or subscribers of AGRIS Forestry will be able to obtain services at the large or the local centres, depending on where they are located, the means of communication and the language or languages they employ. AGRIS Forestry would put to use documentation from all parts of the world which may have significant contributions to make.
AGRIS Forestry was not conceived as a task which the FAO Secretariat should or could carry out alone, but rather as an undertaking of cooperation between all interested parties. FAO's task is to design the system, promote it and coordinate its operation.
AGRIS Forestry will be guided by an advisory board which will also include representatives from the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) and consulting experts in specialized aspects of international documentation. Decisions about where the central data bank should be located and which and how many existing forestry documentation centres will be part of the network have yet to be made, but planning and discussion with potential collaborators have begun. In the four years since FAO was given the task of creating the system, its Member Governments have consistently urged that it be given a high priority, which in itself demonstrates the need felt for it among agricultural scientists throughout the world. Readers are urged to write to Unasylva with reactions and suggestions which may assist in the development of AGRIS.
Are you looking for FAO documents on Environment? Forestry?
The FAO Documentation Centre has issued
Environment An Annotated bibliography and author-subject index of FAO publications and documents on various topics related to natural resources and human environment from 1967 through 1970.
One volume, 728 pages.
US$8.00 £3.20 FF40.00
Forestry A special index of the publications and documents produced from 1945 to 1966 by FAO Forestry Department; 2 500 entries in the bibliographical list, from which the subject-matter index and the author-index are derived.
One volume, 656 pages.
US$7.00 £2.80 FF35.00
Available soon...
Forestry An Annotated bibliography and author-subject index covering all works published by FAO in this field from 1967 through 1973.
Two volumes, approximately 1 000 pages.
Orders to be sent to:
FAO - Distribution and Sales Section,
Via delle Terme di Caracalla,
00100 Rome, Italy
