Agdex—grass‐roots information

Agdex is an indexing service to the intermediate literature of agriculture providing a current awareness and retrieval service primarily for agricultural advisers in Scotland. The development of Agdex from 1973 and the progress made from a manual index using optical co‐incidence cards to an online bibliographic database is described. The processes involved in its production from the selection of material through indexing to searching the database are explained. Since 1973 the market for the service has expanded to include students involved in agricultural education and training throughout the UK. With the needs of users in mind plans for the future include coverage from a wider spectrum of material using co‐operative input and the addition of informative abstracts. Long term, Agdex may become a national bibliographic database for the agriculture industry.