Internet Access to Information on Water Quality and Agriculture

Author(s): Makuch, Joseph R. | Abstract: Using the Internet to improve access to water quality and agricultural information.


Introduction
The National Agricultural Library (NAL), located in Beltsville, Maryland, near Washington D.C., is the largest agricultural library in the world, containing more than two million volumes and maintaining subscriptions to approximately twenty-two thousand periodicals. NAL, part of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), is one of three national libraries of the United States, along with the Library of Congress and the National Library of Medicine (Norris, 1994). NAL serves the agricultural information needs of researchers and educators from government, academia and the private sector in the United States as well as throughout the world.
To better serve its clientele, NAL operates ten information centers that cover a variety of topics. These centers were established over time to provide more in-depth coverage of specific subject areas (USDA, 1994). The Water Quality Information Center began operating in 1990 as part of the USDA's coordinated plan to address water quality concerns (Water Quality Information Center, 1991). As the focal point of NAL's water quality efforts, the center collects, organizes, and disseminates information on the scientific, educational, and public policy aspects of water quality and agriculture.
Shortly after its inception, the center began focusing on developing electronic technology as a means of meeting the needs of center clients. One area of emphasis was developing the Water Information Network (WIN), a conference on NAL's computer bulletin board, the Agricultural Library Forum (Makuch and Schneider, 1993). The center has worked on establishing WIN as a reliable source of up-to-date information relevant to agriculture and water quality (Makuch and Schneider, 1993a). The center continues to maintain WIN and keep it current, but because of vastly greater power and accessibility, current electronic development efforts are concentrating on the Internet. This paper will describe the Water Quality Information Center's use of the Internet to improve access to information regarding water quality and agriculture.

Uses of the Internet
The Internet is a worldwide communications system linking together thousands of computers (Lane and Summerhill, 1993). Stored in these computers is an enormous amount of information accessible through information client/servers such as Gopher and World Wide Web (WWW). Internet information servers offer these features (Sittler, 1994): • -rapid, low cost information dissemination • -storage of text, graphics, sound and animation • -around the clock access • -instant updates of information • -elimination of distance as a constraint to access In addition, information servers can free information workers from much of the drudgery of repetitively answering the same question, while serving an expanded audience (Sittler, 1994).

Special Libraries
Special libraries and information centers generally place a very high emphasis on service to users and the provision of value-added information (Tillman and Ladner, 1994). Answering reference questions, conducting literature searches, making referrals, producing bibliographies, and creating pathfinders to information sources are common activities in an information center. Already accustomed to computer technology through the use of CD-ROMs and online database search services, special librarians can now add the Internet to the list of tools at their disposal (Ladner and Tillman, 1993).
The Internet is a resource for public librarians as well: McClure, Bertot, and Zweizig, (1994) report that nearly forty-one percent of public libraries use Internet at least once per week to help answer patron questions.

WQIC Information on the Internet
The Water Quality Information Center has a Gopher directory and a WWW home page on the Internet. Cost efficiency was the main reason for placing material on Internet. Producing and distributing paper copies of information materials was taxing on the center's few resources. In addition, once posted on the Internet, there is an inexhaustible supply of center publications. The center's major clientele groups (researchers, policy makers and other environmental and agricultural professionals) generally have--or will soon have--Internet access.
The Gopher directory was established on the University of Maryland's InforM gopher server in June 1994.
(The center's files are also accessible through the NAL gopher, established in August 1994). In August 1994, a center home page was established on the University of Maryland WWW server. Similar materials are posted at both sites. The remainder of this paper will discuss the Gopher server since it was more fully developed than the WWW site was when this paper was originally submitted (April 1995).  Table 1 shows the current (April 1995) Water Quality Information Center Gopher menu. Items one and two describe the center's WWW/Gopher files and the mission and activities of the center, respectively.

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Item three in the menu contains two files. One is a listing of calls for papers and meetings related to water quality and agriculture. This file is updated monthly and typically contains eighty to one hundred entries.
Information for this file is obtained from periodicals and conference announcements received by the center as well as postings to Internet mailing lists. In fiscal year 1994, more than three hundred different meetings were listed. The other file in item three gives information on satellite videoconferences related to water resources. This file is also updated monthly and usually contains less than ten listings. Information for this file comes primarily from information compiled by Oregon State University and the University of Missouri.
Item four contains Quick Bibliographies produced by the Water Quality Information Center. Bibliographies in NAL's Quick Bibliography series primarily are intended for current awareness, and as the title of the series implies, are not in-depth and exhaustive. They provide a means of introduction to emerging topics. The bibliographies are derived from online searches of the AGRICOLA database produced by NAL and typically contain one-hundred to three-hundred citations. Table 2 shows the Quick Bibliographies currently available.

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Returning to the main menu (Table 1), users selecting item five can access a listing of Internet discussion lists related to water resources. The listing was compiled by the Water Quality Information Center and is updated as needed. Currently, subscription information for thirty water-related discussion lists is given. The document has been updated twenty-five times since its creation in May, 1994.
Menu item six, "World Food Day 1994: Water for Life," contains information related to the 1994 commemoration of World Food Day, the theme of which was "Water for Life." Because of the vast amount of information on the Internet, users need guidance in locating information on specific topics. As Maddux (1994) states, "One of the first things many new users of the Internet experience is an overwhelming sense of information overload. There is simply so much information available that one can become paralyzed by the immensity of trying to locate and then select what will be useful and appropriate." To answer this concern, item seven, "Other Resources Related to Water Quality," attempts to provide navigational assistance to individuals looking for information on topics related to water quality and agriculture. This directory contains links to other sites on the Internet. These sites have been particularly useful as resources for the Water Quality Information Center and therefore, by extension, should also be useful to the center's clients. Table 3 lists the sites with a brief description of each. Examples of the types of information available at these sights include full-text documents covering pesticide properties and agricultural waste management. In addition to the resources listed in Table 3, the center's WWW site contains links to many additional WWW and Gopher sites.

Summary
As science and public policy strive to develop agricultural systems that are environmentally friendly as well as productive and profitable, the Internet will play an important role in providing efficient access to the information necessary for progress.