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Reports of Special Committees

INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL COMMITTEE

On behalf of Mrs. Bernas Downing, Chairwoman, and members of the Information Storage and Retrieval Committee, it is my pleasure to report very significant progress in adopting a structured thesaurus for national agricultural data bases. This has been the major thrust of our committee1 for the past eight years. The National Agricultural Library (NAL), under the directorship of Dr. Joseph Howard, has agreed in principle to adopt the recently published Commonwealth Agriculture Bureaux's (CAB) structured thesaurus for the information storage and retrieval purposes in the AGRICOLA data base.

For the past several years, NAL has been providing coverage of the world's agricultural literature through the AGRICOLA data base (formerly CAIN). As a vocabulary, NAL has relied on a title-word free text system with occasional title enrichment from an unstructured word list. It has been our contention that NAL should move toward a structured thesaurus. Fortunately, other agricultural scientific societies and a Blue Ribbon Panel appointed by Secretary Block for a review of NAL programs have supported our position.