EDINA Update is a bibliographic index to “land‐based literature whose focus is more practical than scholarly”. This database claims to be the only index to cover popular press and trade magazines in agriculture and related subjects. If it delivered on this claim, the database would be tremendously valuable to academic libraries, public libraries, farmers, and environmental organizations. Large numbers of agricultural news publications, environmental association magazines, gardening periodicals, trade association publications and practical government‐produced literature are available. While these publications vary greatly in quality, agricultural literature is vast and often difficult to access. Since the advent of the internet, a much greater proportion of this literature is being made accessible via the web, but lack of organization of the information, and efficient means of accessing it, remain problem.
While scholarly indexes such as CAB Abstracts and AGRICOLA are excellent resources for tapping into the scholarly periodical literature of agriculture, they provide inadequate coverage of the research literature for researchers, and do not attempt to provide access to practical literature for practitioners or hobbyists. A number of organizations are attempting to make this grey literature more accessible. These include AgNIC (http://www.agnic.org), USAIN (http://www.usain.org), and SIDALC (http://orton.catie.ac.cr), in addition to many government agencies.
EDINA Update indexes over 750 journals and adds over 18,500 records annually. The index covers from 1990 to the present. The literature emphasizes British and Commonwealth publications, which makes it potentially useful for library collections in the UK. While the database makes much of its practical focus, the database still indexes a large number of scholarly titles. This also makes it useful for those institutions that cannot afford a database like CAB Abstracts and do not want to depend solely on the US‐based AGRICOLA. EDINA Update is still a very small database in comparison to a database like CAB Abstracts, which adds in the neighborhood of 180,000 records annually and indexes a reported 9,000 serials (www.cabi‐publishing.org/AbstractDatabases.asp?SubjectArea=&PID=125).
The web interface of EDINA Update is simple to use and includes basic features one would except from a bibliographic database. A top banner allows for easy navigation between various functions. These include Standard Search, Advanced Search, Wordlist Search, Indexes (for article titles and source), Marked Records, Search History, Help, and Exit. All the screens are easy to read. The interface includes searching via a core set of fields. Basic Boolean searching, nesting and truncation, internal wildcards, and phrase searching are available. The Advanced Search includes multiple search boxes. The refine search feature is easy to find and use. Current awareness is facilitated by limits to specific weekly updates in addition to publication year limits. The lack of proximity searches does not pose much of a problem in a database without full‐text or abstracts, especially considering the database's limited size. The Wordlist provides alphabetical access to a monolingual indexing thesaurus with linked terms that will run searches in the database and linked syndetic structure. The thesaurus and the subject terms are linked in the result sets. The search history featured lets users rerun, combine, and save past searches.
Result sets of less than 50 records can be sorted by source, year, and subject heading. The database includes marking capabilities. Output formats include bibliographic citation and full record. The output from the Marked Records screen includes options to e‐mail, print, or save, but the “output all” button from the search results page only enables e‐mail output. The printed output includes the unnecessary top banner of the search interface and other navigational elements of the Marked Records screen. These elements waste approximately a quarter of the first printout page (8.5×11). Only one format is available for saving, and it does not lend itself to importing records into personal bibliography management software. The database cannot be currently used as an OpenURL source database, which would enhance its usability, but it can be connected to other databases using the Z39.50 (ISO 2950) protocol.
EDINA Update includes a series of help guides on its web site. They range from a simple but useful quick guide to a marketing presentation and a downloadable “Screencam” demonstration of the database. In addition, EDINA Update includes simple context‐sensitive help within the database itself.
The search interface is simple, but contains no major flaws. The cost of EDINA Update is a little high for non‐JISC subsidized institutions, but could be worthwhile for those with programmes in agriculture and environmental studies – despite its small size. The database could also be worthwhile for public libraries serving agrarian users.
