AGRIS user guide is now available in Georgian

The Georgian translation of the “AGRIS, the International System for Agricultural Science and Technology” (FAO, 2020) has been released on the FAO Document Repository and also made available on the AGRIS website. 

The Research Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, TECHINFORMI, is one of the unique multidisciplinary scientific information centres based in Tbilisi, Georgia, which provides a wide variety of information services to scientists throughout the country. Since 2020, Institute TECHINFORMI has  been operating as  AGRIS Country Hub. Dr. Marina Razmadze, deputy director at TECHINFORMI coordinated the translation of the guide. 

Since 2000 TECHINFORMI is part of the AGRIS network, how would you describe your role in AGRIS?

TECHINFORMI has been functioning as a data provider center  for AGRIS and in 2020 the Institute was appointed AGRIS Country Hub in Georgia. Since then, it has contributed with over 2000 bibliographic records. TECHINFORMI submits bibliographic references of scientific articles, book and monograph chapters, datasets and grey literature - including unpublished scientific and technical reports, theses, dissertations and conference papers in the area of food and agriculture.

AGRIS is one of the powerful agricultural web portals which gives access to the world class information resources and plays an important role for information sharing, accessing and distribution among the agriculture communities in Georgia. TECHINFORMI is an official member of the fast growing international AGRIS community and is very happy to contribute to one of the biggest agricultural networks of the world.  

It serves as a unique platform for sharing national scientific information from Georgian research institutions, academia and individual researchers, to make it globally visible and available among high-quality, structured, bibliographic records indexed from a worldwide group of providers. TECHINFORMI as the  AGRIS Country Hub in Georgia strives to participate in a joint action of data providers from different countries to contribute to the common effort to reduce the gap in accessing scientific information and digital data in food and agriculture.

Why did you see the need to translate the guide into Georgian and  what was the purpose of translating the document? 

English is one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world, but that doesn’t mean you can overlook all the people who don’t speak it. Dale Carnegie, an American writer and lecturer, may have been right when he said: “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” But the next sweetest sound is their native language.

Recently, awareness about the AGRIS web portal has grown rapidly among Georgian agriculture communities. It is a well-known fact that if you wish to be versed in new technologies or instruments at a professional level, you need to read and consult guides and various technical documentation. In order to attract more information specialists, deepen and enrich the knowledge about how to use the AGRIS database as an independent user and how to provide content as data provider, TECHINFORMI decided to translate the official user guide into Georgian. Translation of such kinds of documents is crucial to reach more people within the scientific institutions, university libraries and journal publishers from Georgia to become an independent AGRIS data provider.

What are the benefits foreseen by having this translation done? 

The AGRIS user guide in Georgian will facilitate the engagement of a wider audience in the process of harvesting and registering metadata for AGRIS. The guide will simplify the process of navigation on the AGRIS web portal for local users, as well as help in discovering information and use different tools and filters for the most suitable results. The Georgian version of the guide will facilitate the understanding of practical examples during the workshop/training sessions at national level, overcoming the language barriers to move forward utilizing modern tools in the agriculture domain.

To sum up, for the existing and future AGRIS data providers, the Georgian version of the guide will serve as an important document which will open the doors to AGRIS web portal and respectively provide the latest technical developments, recommended standards and different ways to engage with the agricultural community.

We know that AGRIS users are represented by a very large category of users including government officials, students, librarians, publishers, researchers, etc. Could you give us an idea of which group of  users could benefit from this guide in Georgian the most? 

AGRIS user guide could be useful and beneficial for everyone. It is written in such a way that its content is simple both for proficient users (information specialist, existing data provider, software programmer, etc.) and for individuals who are just starting to use AGRIS (students, first-time librarians, government officials, new data providers and independent individuals).

Currently the most popular users are librarians. Georgian version of AGRIS user guide helps them to better understand the strategies and methods of information retrieval, which correspondingly leads to improving the process of identifying relevant information.

Another category of users are potential new Data Providers such as scientific organizations and journal publishers, who need to understand how to provide information and to describe and select appropriate metadata to manage and exchange bibliographic information.

TECHINFORMI is an active user of this guide as well. It helps to facilitate the practical sessions during the online and face to face training at national level for the Ministry of Agriculture, National Academy of Agricultural Sciences, NGO’s, etc.

 

What other types of publications would be helpful for AGRIS users and data providers? 

For Georgia and in particular for the Institute TECHINFORMI the following types of publications will be of interest:

Practical guides on: 

• Criteria for selecting publication for AGRIS and quality control measures; and 
• How to become national and regional Hubs at the national and country level, with a detailed description of the national and regional AGRIS Hubs functions.

Promotional materials/leaflets about:

• The AGRIS dashboard and its functions;
• How it works the interaction between AGRIS and Google Scholar; 
• Advantages of AGRIS - as a different web portal for agriculture domain among the world of scientific databases. It might be interesting as well for the whole AGRIS community.