Research News

A new Virtual Library developed by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has been developed to deliver access to research on agriculture, hunger, poverty, and the environment.

A search engine searches across a number of leading agricultural information databases, including the online libraries of all the CGIAR centres, including masses of important grey literature, allowing users to discover resources. Citations link in many cases to the full text of publications. Databases can be selected individually, or searched using preselected topic-based ‘QuickSets’.

In more detail, the CGVLibrary aims to:

• guide agricultural and social scientists to high quality resources available on the Internet;
• simplify searches of disparate document-type databases by providing a common search interface providing the functionality to search multiple databases;
• augment and reinforce existing CG information services using dynamic linking protocols that facilitate access from metadata records in library catalogs, publications databases and abstracting/indexing services to hard copy documents held in centre libraries and to full electronic text where available;
• enable searches across the range of library catalog information within the CG system;
• facilitate universal access to CG publications and learning resources by exposing metadata from CG centre catalogs to other information services; and
• give CG researchers immediate electronic and global access to a core of agricultural science journals.

Visit the CGVlibrary at: http://vlibrary.cgiar.org

See the user guide to searching here

For further information contact CGVlibrary@cgiar.org

DFID provides funding to the CGIAR and research undertaken by its centres. See here for some of the recent DFID projects that CGIAR have been involved with (more projects can be found by searching using individual CGIAR centre names in the word search on the R4D Advanced Search.