The Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC) <http://www.agnic.org> provides access to agriculture‐related information, subject area experts, and other resources. AgNIC is maintained and governed by the AgNIC Alliance, whose members include the National Agriculture Library, land‐grant university libraries and other agricultural libraries, extension services, and other organizations. Each member of the alliance is responsible for developing Web pages for a specific subject area within the agricultural field. In a collaborative effort, each member institution contributes to the collective AgNIC resource and to its common goal of providing enhanced access to WWW‐based agricultural information.
From the Partners link located on AgNIC’s top navigational bar, users can view all of the alliance partners and link to their individual subject pages. Subjects range from very broad areas such as sustainable agriculture, forestry, water quality, and animal welfare to narrower areas such as blueberries or asparagus. In order to maintain an identity with AgNIC, each institution contains the AgNIC seal on their pages. Additionally, each of these libraries offers users an opportunity to ask questions of subject experts.
The AgNIC interface is very clear and easy to use. From the opening screen, users can perform a simple or advanced subject search or choose to browse by topic area. AgNIC also features a searchable thesaurus that includes all of the subject terms used to describe Web resources contained within its database. Both simple and advanced searching modes support the use of AND, OR, and NOT to combine terms. In the advanced search, users can truncate terms, or search a partial word or an exact phrase. The record display of retrieved results is especially impressive. Each record includes the title of the resource, a detailed description, subject descriptors, keywords, and the URL.
In addition to providing a guide to agricultural information on the Internet, the AgNIC Alliance offers several project databases and directories. Perhaps best known is the AGRICOLA bibliographic database created and maintained by the National Agriculture Library. Other projects include CB Pest, Database of the Occurrence and Distribution of Pesticides in Chesapeake Bay; DIRAgIR, Directories of Agriculture‐Related Internet Information Resources; AgExp, Directories of Experts in Agriculture; and PDA, Plant Diseases Announcements. Because these are such important resources, this reviewer would like to see them more prominently featured on the AgNIC home page. Currently they are listed under Projects on the About AgNIC Web page. This placement makes these resources difficult to locate on the Web site.
For professionals in the field, the AgNIC calendar acts as a central repository for information and links concerning agricultural conferences, meetings, and seminars.
The overall design of the Web site is quite simple and easy to navigate. Although the site makes minimal use of graphics, it is attractively presented in a yellow and green color scheme. A quick check of resources retrieved by searches did indicate a few bad links indicating a need for more vigilant maintenance of the resources contained within the database.
The Agriculture Network Information Center provides a very useful resource for academic research and for professionals in the field. It also offers a good amount of links to consumer information that are available from agricultural extension services. AgNIC’s member institutions have done a fine job of maintaining high standards in selecting quality agriculture information on the Internet.
